An Approach of Trajectory Estimation for High-speed Unmanned Skid-steered Vehicle

Abstract

With robust structure and high maneuverability, skidsteered vehicles have been widely used in terrain exploration, construction, rescue and relief fields. Inevitable slipping and sliding of the tire that makes the vehicle status difficult to obtain. In this paper, an equivalent differential driven kinematic model is proposed. Additionally, the mapping relationship of slippage coefficient defined in the original 4-wheel unmanned skid-steered vehicle and the wheel location in the equivalent model are discussed. The proposed equivalent wheel location obtains explicit physical significance. The slippage of the tire has also been calculated by estimating the position of instantaneous center of rotation (ICR) of the wheels from multi-sensors. An unscented Kalman filter (UKF) based fusion method is adapted to obtain the vehicle status. A prototype vehicle named DUBHE is adapted to verify the reliability of the informed method. Preliminary experimental results are compared to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in different scenarios.