Autonomy as a feature of ground vehicles is receiving broader and deeper research interest and engineering implementation in both unmanned vehicles and manned vehicle system applications. New directions in autonomous systems research and design have been gathering momentum during the past 10–15 years, including trajectory path planning and optimization, sensor data information fusion, vehicle kinematics and dynamics control, and many others. Even so, vehicle dynamic behavior and operational properties such as terrain and tactical mobility and energy efficiency, stability and safety, vehicle mission and task fulfillment in severe operational conditions (which include non-prepared terrain, climate and weather impacts, as well as today's aggressive cyber environments) have improved only incrementally at best. A detailed analysis showed that classical vehicle dynamics, which is the basis for manned ground vehicle design, has exhausted its potential to a large degree for providing novel design concepts. At the same time, unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) dynamics is still in its infancy and is currently developing using general analytical dynamics principles with very little involvement of actual vehicle dynamics theory.

In this regard, the main purpose of the NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) was to

(i) Analyze and present leading-edge research and engineering accomplishments and future trends in manned and unmanned ground vehicle dynamics as an analytical foundation for autonomous vehicle system design for severe environments and

(ii) Inspire young generation of researchers/engineers to work in these novel directions.

In keeping with these main goals, the ASI uniquely integrated renowned researchers from different areas of study whose contributions made it possible to establish new frontiers, methods and techniques in vehicle dynamics, severe terrain condition modelling, on-line control and learning, mechatronics and cyber-physics related issues. Accordingly, the book may be split into three parts: 1. novel research directions in vehicle dynamics that provide a basis for future autonomous system design; 2. advanced methods in on-line control and learning that can be utilized in autonomous system control design, and 3. main mechatronics and cyber-physics fundamentals to design for control, energy harvesting and cyber-security.

The book systematically presents material developed by the ASI's book contributors. Furthermore, the ASI inspired several contributors to continue their research work and thus the book includes new research results accomplished while the manuscript was being written after the ASI had been delivered.

The book opens with the historic aspects of ground vehicle dynamics and design, including major research done within the NATO. Building on that, it formulates and discusses future potential research directions in vehicle dynamics, such as inverse vehicle dynamics, agility in vehicle dynamics and agile mobility estimation, coupled and interactive system dynamics (i.e., fusion of dynamics of vehicle systems), advanced methods for wheel power distribution optimization to maximize energy/fuel efficiency and terrain mobility while minimizing damage of soil by the locomotion system.

Severe environment conditions and situations are presented in the book and advanced measurement, quantification and modelling methods are discussed. Also, an analysis of terrorist threats, agile vehicle trajectory deviation and critical reposition of a vehicle in interaction with environment is offered.

Mathematical and computational techniques and software products are described for the modelling of multibody vehicle dynamics in the presence of uncertainties, which are simulated with a polynomial chaos approach.

The on-line control, learning methods and techniques presented here bring together distributed and cooperative on-line control, reinforcement learning, and game theory to achieve a radical improvement in the agile performance of unmanned ground vehicles, including vehicle teams, at high speeds.

The book provides procedures for mechatronics design that are hierarchically separated into topological design and parametric design. The “mechatronics design for control performance” approach is explored and integrated into the overall design methodology and its optimization. Cyber-physics issues are detailed to emphasize all aspects of the vehicle mechatronics and ensure the security of the sensory communication system between the mechanical-electrical interconnected components.

Vehicle design and analysis for ride, handling and durability is addressed combining a description of how multibody systems analysis can be used to look at suspension systems, the use of finite element analysis to optimise lightweight vehicle structures and the influence of mass distribution on vehicle dynamics performance. The use of mathematical vehicle models and multi-objective programming to optimise suspension performance is also included and complements the use of standard software products.

This book could not be accomplished without the support and hard work of many people from various organisations. The editors and contributors would like to express their gratitude to the NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme which provided a grant to establish and conduct the ASI and to the reviewers who positively reviewed our ASI proposal and recommended it to NATO for approval. We thank all ASI attendees for their active participation, shared ideas and thoughts that have led to the successful completion of the ASI and, now, this book. Our sincere thanks to the ASI Organizing Committee including Heather Creel, Laura Harris, Rebecca Russell, Mostafa Salama, Sherrye Watson and many of our undergraduate and graduate students whose help with the ASI preparation was tremendous. We are grateful to the Faculty of Engineering and Computing at Coventry University who provided excellent facilities and hosted the ASI.

The editors look forward to continuing the research work and collaboration with the chapter contributors and express their hope for to share new finding in the near future.

Prof. Vladimir V. Vantsevich

University of Alabama at Birmingham, U.S.A.

Hoover, AL, U.S.A.

Prof. Michael V. Blundell

Coventry University, UK

Coventry, UK