SEASONAL EFFECTS ON VEHICLE MOBILITY: HIGH-LATITUDE CASE STUDY

Seasonality plays a key role in altering the terrain of many military operating environments. Since seasonality has such a large impact on the terrain, it needs to be properly accounted for in vehicle dynamics models. This work outlines a variety of static and dynamic seasonal terrain conditions and their impacts on vehicle mobility in an austere region of Europe. Overall the vehicles performed the best in the dry season condition. The thaw season condition had the most drastic impact on mobility with all but the heavy tracked vehicle being almost completely NOGO in the region. Overall, the heavy tracked vehicle had the best performance in all terrain conditions. These results highlight the importance of incorporating seasonal impacts on terrain into NRMM or any vehicle dynamics model. Future work will focus on collecting more data to improve the empirical relationships between vehicles and seasonal terrain conditions, thereby allowing for more accurate speed predictions.

Citation: T. Hodgdon, S. Shoop, S. Frankenstein, M. Bigl, M. Parker, “Seasonal Effects on Vehicle Mobility: High-Latitude Case Study”, In Proceedings of the Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering and Technology Symposium (GVSETS), NDIA, Novi, MI, Aug. 13-15, 2019.