A Physics-Based Power Model for Skid-Steered Wheeled Mobile Robots

The power consumed by skid-steered mobile robots varies enormously depending on their operating regimes and environments. Therefore, energy optimal planning of field missions can be accomplished only if the operating environment and an accurate model of the robot's power consumption are known in advance. This paper studies influences of location of the center of mass, surface type, terrain relief, platform geometry, radius of curvature, speed, and temperature on the power consumption of a skid-steered mobile platform and derives a physics-based power model that uses friction to accurately model the power consumed for the most relevant parameters inside a wide range of operating conditions. This paper also shows how friction can be measured using power consumed by the motors and how motor constants can he measured in a noninvasive end-to-end manner. Our findings were validated with a Clearpath's Husky A200 platform, driving it indoors and outdoors on different surfaces, varying the speed, the radius of curvature, the mass, and the center of mass location, resulting in a dense dataset on which the derived model as well as the temperature dependence of the power consumption was verified.