Simulating Physical Interactions between an Articulated Mobile Vehicule and a Terrain

This paper has been presented at the ORIA '91 conference on 'Telerobotics in Hostile Environments', 11-12 December, 1991, Marseille, FranceInternational audienceThis paper deals with the problem of planning the motion of a complex land vehicle moving in a natural environment. The contribution presented here is a motion generator which predicts the dynamic behaviour of the vehicle when executing a given nominal motion plan. This plan is expressed in terms of a channel that must be followed and of a set of intermediate subgoals that must be reached. Solving this motion generation problem requires to explicitly reason about the geometric and the physical aspects of the movements that the vehicle has to execute. In our approach, this is done by using two basic constructions derived from the concept of physical model: the 'generalized obstacles' are used to physically guide the movements of the vehicle using an explicit model of the vehicle-terrain interactions, and the 'physical targets' are used to map the strategic information onto our physical representation of the world and to introduce the force feedback gestural control