Systematic solution for optimally energy-efficient turning radius for wheeled skid-steer rovers

A skid-steer rover’s power consumption is highly dependent on the turning radius of its path, with a point turn consuming much more power compared to straight line motion. As energy is the integration of instantaneous power over time, a trade-off between arcs’ turning radii and lengths should be made to minimize energy consumption. Because of the skid-steer rovers’ ability to do point turns the simplest and shortest way to traverse a distance between two points is by doing a point turn-line-point turn (PLP) maneuver. However, we show that wheeled skid-steer rovers there are scenarios where optimal Circle–Line–Circle (CLC) paths consume less energy than PLP paths. Therefore, the goal in this work is to find the best path from among CLC paths; Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) conditions are used to systematically obtain the optimally energy-efficient answer for the CLC paths. It is assumed that the rovers move forward on hard flat ground. For solving the problem, a new practical constraint constant-vc is suggested. In this paper, comparing the KKT conditions and experimental results reveals that the lowest total energy consumption for CLC paths with or without considering constant-vc constraint is obtained by selecting turning radii equal to R′ (the half of slip-track).