Citation

Williams DE. Veh. Syst. Dyn. 2012; 50(1): 149-166.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/00423114.2011.577225

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The familiar two-axle bicycle model and associated basic concepts of vehicle handling are reviewed and used to introduce minor changes in convention from the literature. The two-axle model is extended to a three-axle vehicle to illustrate the effectiveness of the notation combined with a simplifying mathematical identity found in the two-axle vehicle literature. A generalised model is then developed that produces dynamic equations of motion by inspection for a vehicle with an arbitrary number of steerable and non-steerable axles. Furthermore, the vehicle dynamic concepts of understeer and wheelbase are generalised and can be directly computed for various arbitrary vehicle configurations.