Design, Analysis and Prototype Development of All Terrain Hybrid-Vehicle for Scientific Expedition

• Main Authors: Manivannan, Shyam Sunder, Kuttikrishnan, Gopkumar, Siva, Rajesh, Ramadass, G A
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Subjects: FEM; Hybrid Vehicle; MBD; Mobile Robot; Remote Control; RPT; Trafficability
• ISSN: 0148-7191; 2688-3627
• DOI: 10.4271/2017-28-1938

The hybrid robot will be a battery operated four wheel drive vehicle with a rigid chassis for all terrain operation. The vehicle will be suited for various payloads based on applications with geological, atmospheric sensors and buried object identification at a depth of 8 to 100 m., etc. The vehicle will be remotely controlled through a RF signal, allows it to maneuver up to 5 km. The novelty of the design, is its capability for all terrain and ease of trafficability based on skid steering, self-alignment of sensors and vehicle traction in spite of possible inverted conditions and the vehicle can travel from land, snow, water and vice versa. The vehicle could be deployed for surveying coastline of water bodies, borderlines and also be extensively used in polar region for studying glacier aging and as advance vehicle for the convoys and polar mapping. The detailed design approach of the chassis, power train and weather proofing for extreme low temperature application, Analysis on the behavior of structure in static and dynamic conditions with Finite Element Method (FEM) and Multi-body dynamics (MBD) were studied. Further the vehicle geometry was modeled and printed in Rapid prototyping (RPT) method for form fit function.