DUKW-21 Autonomous Navigation: Transitioning Between Sea and Land
2010
Flom, Benjamin D
Autonomous amphibious vehicles have the potential to revolutionize supply chain operations involving the transport of cargo from a Sea Base to troops ashore. In 2007, a team of Center for Innovation in Ship Design (CISD) interns developed a design concept called DUKW-21, an amphibious vehicle meant to support one crew member onboard, with the potential for future integration of an autonomous control system. While DUKW-21 is designed to be a tracked vehicle, for simplicity, a wheeled 1/7th scale model was designed and built, called DUKW-ling, which has successfully demonstrated limited autonomy. Unlike an air-cushion vehicle, a tracked or wheeled amphibious vehicle must travel through three distinct environments: sea, (dry) land, and the transition zone, where the vehicle's ground propulsors are engaged with the sea-floor, but the vehicle is still partially submerged underwater. In this report, an original, baseline model of a tracked or wheeled amphibious vehicle in the transition is developed. This model is then used to study vehicle routing in the transition with the objective of minimizing travel time. In particular, a closed-form characterization of a preferred travel route is derived. Under certain conditions, it is also shown that the baseline model of the transition can be applied to hills on land.
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