Dynamics of Narrow Tilting Vehicles

Abstract

Narrow commuter vehicles can address many congestion, parking and pollution issues associated with urban transportation. In making narrow vehicles safe, comfortable and acceptable to the public, active tilt control systems are likely to play a crucial role. This paper concentrates on developing a dynamic model for narrow vehicles that can be used for the design and evaluation of active tilt control systems. The model has four degrees of freedom including lateral and tilt dynamics. The influence of gyroscopic forces due to rotating wheels and the influence of front wheel trail are included but secondary coupling effects are ignored so as to keep the model tractable. The model is used in this paper to understand the influence of vehicle tilt on the steering angle required for cornering, the desired tilt angle for any specified cornering maneuver and the influence of gyroscopic moments on transient tilting/cornering maneuvers. A study of the model equations also provides insight into how narrow vehicles can be designed so as to be self-stabilizing.

Experimental Investigation of a Narrow Leaning Vehicle Tilt Stability Control System

“…The vehicle dynamics model developed in this section is an extension of the NTV model developed by Rajamani el al. [4] with provisions made for the effect of road bank angle.…”

“…Using small angle approximations, the dynamic system associated with the above degrees of freedom is can be represented by the following linear model [4].…”

Road bank angle considerations in modeling and tilt stability controller design for narrow commuter vehicles

“…Assuming the lateral tire forces to be proportional to the wheel slip angle and wheel camber angle, the front and rear wheels lateral forces can be represented by the following equation [6].…”

“…Even though their work lays the basic principles for designing a DTC system, in some of the desired tilt angle calculation ( [2,3,4]) they fail to take into account the lateral position acceleration of the vehicle which results in high transient torque requirement of the controller. In addition, in the works by these and other authors the effect of road bank angle is usually not incorporated in modeling and control system design of narrow tilting vehicles ( [2,3,5,6,7,8,11,12]). The lack of consideration of road bank angle results in significant increase in transient torque requirement and will also result in a non zero steady state torque requirement.…”

Personal robot assisting transportation to support active human life — Human-following method based on model predictive control for adjacency without collision

“…It is difficult for conventional robots to achieve both of these requirements. In order to overcome this problem, a posture actuator that controls the roll angle of the upper body is applied [3], [6]. In our previous research work, quick turning motion ( Fig.…”