Theory of Ground Vehicles, 5th Edition

2Mechanics of Vehicle–Terrain Interaction: Terramechanics

While transporting passengers and goods by vehicles on paved roads constitutes a significant part of surface transportation in a modern society, a wide range of human endeavors, in such fields as agriculture, construction, logging, mining, recreation, and defense operations, involves locomotion over unprepared terrain using off‐road vehicles. With mankind’s increasing interest in exploration of the universe, manned or unmanned rovers have been deployed to the Moon and Mars for surface exploration.

Systematic studies of the principles underlying the rational development of off‐road vehicles have attracted growing interest, particularly since World War II. Research into the fundamentals for guiding the development of extraterrestrial rovers was initiated in earnest in the 1960s, leading to the successful deployment to the moon of the manned lunar roving vehicle by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and of the unmanned Lunokhod by the then Soviet Union in the 1970s. In recent years, unmanned robotic rovers have been successfully deployed to Mars by several countries.

The development of guiding principles for the optimal design of off‐road vehicles or extraterrestrial rovers requires an in‐depth understanding of the physical nature of interaction between the vehicle (or rover) and the terrain (or regolith). The mechanics of interaction of an off‐road vehicle or an extraterrestrial rover with the ...