Abstract
M.Tech. (Electrical Engineering)
Vehicles are critical to the military in carrying out functional capacities such as firepower, command and control, protection, sustainment, situational awareness, and intelligence. There is particular need to understand the parameters that will influence the efficient movement of a military vehicle and this can be achieved through researching tire modelling, terrain analysis, and ride comfort. Various research projects have been carried out to understand various subsystems and factors that make up a military vehicle, and they focused mainly on understanding parameters that influencing tire modelling, tire characteristics sensitivity study, terrain analysis and ride comfort. Theoretically, to understand these parameters various studies for on-road conditions have been conducted while less research on off-road conditions has been carried out. In the current century vehicle, technology designs have seen advancement through vehicle simulation, which is less time consuming and reduces the cost of development. Accurate terrain profiles are an integral part of the effective simulation as they are required input. Understanding the ability to measure valid terrain profile accurately is of fundamental importance. The first contribution of this study is introducing a validation method for off-road profilometer. The second contribution of the study is the validation of the LMT off-road profilometer. Current validation methods focused on evaluating the accuracy of on road pavement profilers. The method of calibration by excitation and validation against knows obstacles are efficient and thus in the current study this method is incorporated to introduce a validation method which does not depend on known obstacle or terrains. For off-road profiling, the challenge is that off-road terrain is random and changes after every test thus validation through comparison of known obstacle or terrain is thus not possible. The presented method in this study is the laser sensor profile acquisition method developed to validate LMT profilometer off-road, which allows for independent terrain validation and ability to quantify the error found in each measurement. Experimental and simulations are conducted on the LMT profilometer, and the validation of the device is presented, and the RMS error is used to quantify the accuracy of the instrument.