Paper presented at ISTVS 2025 | 55th Conference of the International Society for Terrain-Vehicle Systems https://doi.org/10.56884/6SKEESJC
Authors: Eric Karpman, Wei Huang, Nikita Yovchev, Patrick Kehoe
Keywords: Ride Quality.; Rough Terrain.; Off-road.; Simulation.; Vibration Testing.
Abstract:
Ride quality is an important metric for assessing the comfort and safety of vehicle passengers as a vehicle traverses rough off-road terrain. One common approach for assessing ride quality is the Absorbed Power metric, which sets a power threshold below which a crew member can effectively perform their tasks. The roughness of the terrain itself is characterized by the root mean square (RMS) value of the terrain profile as per TOP-1-1-014. Using an accelerometer to measure the acceleration experienced by the passengers, a series of tests can be conducted in which the vehicle and traverses a given course at constant speeds, increasing the speed with each traversal. By calculating the absorbed power at each speed, a maximum allowable speed can be determined for a given course. Because it is not always possible to take a vehicle into the field to test it on such a course, vibration testing using a four-post shaker to emulate the terrain profile can be used as an alternate test to assess the ride quality. In this work, we perform vibration testing on a light utility vehicle in an effort to assess ride quality over an asymmetric 3cm RMS terrain. Additional physical testing – including a tilt test to determine center of gravity height – were performed to tune a digital twin of the vehicle. The same suite of tests was performed on the digital twin in a virtual environment and compared to the physical test results. The virtual test of the vehicle traversing the 3cm RMS course that the vibration test emulates was also performed on the digital twin to compare vibration testing results to that of a fully modelled traversal of the terrain.
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