High Stability Traversing Practice of a MAS‐UGV on Impassable Abrupt Roads

ABSTRACT Multi‐axle active suspension vehicles are very promising for traversing impassable abrupt roads under high payload demands and complement the strengths of mobile robots. However, this hope is severely blocked by the high‐order indeterminate property of the vehicle and the complex vehicle‐ground interactions, making the suspension adjustment infinitely solvable. For the low‐speed traversing reality, this paper first proposes a body attitude and wheel load coupling control model based on the explicit characterization of the load‐deformation coupling nature of vehicles; then, the suspension adjustment‐based wheel gait control is designed for typical impassable scenarios, wherein the coupling control model is invoked to solve the suspension adjustment under the stability objectives; finally, a multi‐axle active suspension unmanned ground vehicle (MAS‐UGV) in near‐conventional configurations is developed and typical abrupt road traversing experiments are carried out. Experiments confirm that the proposed framework and controller can support high stability traversing of multi‐axle active suspension vehicles (at least 50% improvement in attitude stability and controllable wheel loads) on originally impassible abrupt roads via the bionic‐like gait, thus providing new possibilities for UGVs and even near‐conventional vehicles to construct versatile, tough terrain crossing schemes.