Good understanding of relationship between parameters of vehicle,terrain and interaction at the interface is required to develop effective navigation and motion control algorithms for autonomous wheeled mobile robots(AWMR) in rough terrain.A model and analysis of relationship among wheel slippage(S),rotation angle(θ),sinkage(z) and wheel radius(r) are presented.It is found that wheel rotation angle,sinkage and radius have some influence on wheel slippage.A multi-objective optimization problem with slippage as utility function was formulated and solved in MATLAB.The results reveal the optimal values of wheel-terrain parameters required to achieve optimum slippage on dry sandy terrain.A method of slippage estimation for a five-wheeled mobile robot was presented through comparing the odometric measurements of the powered wheels with those of the fifth non-powered wheel.The experimental result shows that this method is feasible and can be used for online slippage estimation in a sandy terrain.
