DART: Dual-Axis Airborne Reachability-Gated Torque-Reaction for Off-Road Vehicle Jumps

2026-07-31

AI Summary

This study addresses the critical challenge of vehicle attitude instability during airborne phases in high-speed off-road driving, which often leads to severe collisions. The authors propose an integrated control strategy combining pre-takeoff velocity shaping with in-flight coordinated dual-axis torque control. By leveraging backward propagation within a flyable domain, they construct a closed-form feasible takeoff set and introduce a roll-latching mechanism based on yaw-roll coupling analysis to enable precise pitch and roll regulation. In-flight attitude feedback is achieved through reaction torques generated by in-wheel actuators. Simulation results demonstrate a 36% reduction in landing impact velocity and an improvement in successful target landings from 0/30 to 30/30, significantly outperforming conventional PD and bang-bang control approaches.

Abstract

Traversing crests, ledges, and ditches at high speed often launches vehicles into the air, and a mishandled landing presents a substantial crash hazard. We show that the airborne phase is barely controllable: on a 1383 kg platform the wheel angular-momentum budget caps the recoverable pitch-rate change at roughly $9$-$13^\circ$/s in the tighter nose-up direction under drive at typical takeoff wheel speeds, and at about twice that in the reverse-inclusive braking direction; driving the wheels to their drivetrain hard limit raises the measured nose-up ceiling to only $16$-$18^\circ$/s. Takeoff pitch-rate disturbances beyond this directional budget are physically unrecoverable in flight, so the decisive leverage lies before takeoff. DART (Dual-Axis Airborne Reachability-Gated Torque-Reaction) back-propagates the landing constraint into a closed-form certified feasible-takeoff set, which supplies a conservative go/no-go condition and a pre-takeoff speed-shaping law. In flight, DART regulates pitch and roll via steer-resolved wheel-reaction torque, governed by a per-flight roll latch derived from the yaw-coupling analysis. In deterministic full-scale simulation in BeamNG.tech, a calibrated pre-takeoff speed regulator reduces touchdown speed by 36% and raises on-target landings from 0/30 to 30/30. Under the same steep-lip approach the airborne law completes 29/30 safe landings under crash-avoidance bounds versus 0/30 for reaction-wheel-style PD (RW-PD) and time-optimal bang-bang (TOBB). On banked run-ups DART holds the median pitch error at or below $2^\circ$ at every cross-slope, with the largest baseline separation at $γ=12^\circ$. Across disturbance regimes, the latch preserves pitch-only allocation on low-disturbance entries and enables dual-axis control when roll becomes binding. All results are from simulation; hardware validation remains open.

Problem

• off-road vehicle jumps
• airborne control
• landing safety
• pitch-rate disturbance
• takeoff feasibility

Innovation

• DART
• airborne vehicle control
• torque-reaction
• reachability analysis
• off-road jumping