Exploring Serially Connected Multi-Tracked All-Terrain Vehicles for Improved Obstacle Climbing Performance

Abstract

The paper presents design specification of three tracked all-terrain vehicles: a ‘Single Tracked Vehicle’ (STV), where the payload is placed between two single, parallel tracks, a ‘Double Tracked Vehicle’ (DTV) where two sets of two serially connected tracks are joined together, and a ‘Triple Tracked Vehicle’ (TTV) where two sets of three serially connected tracks are joined together in parallel to carry the load. The paper provides a theoretical model for the obstacle climbing ability of the vehicles, where an obstacle is defined as a step. A model of each vehicle is developed using Lego-Mindstorms TM toolkit, and experiments are conducted to find the maximum heights and the maximum slopes climbed by each vehicle. It is found that the TTV has a substantially better obstacle climbing ability than Shrimp III – the existing robot with the best climbing performance. The results compare well with the theoretical models.