Citation

Fard M, Jazar RN, Vo D. Int. J. Veh. Des. 2017; 74(2): 134-152.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Inderscience Publishers)

DOI

10.1504/IJVD.2017.10006549

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This paper presents the kinematics of a steerable tyre with a variable caster. It serves as a first step towards developing the theory of variable caster steering in which wheel camber is controlled by the variable caster. The homogeneous transformation was utilised as a tool to develop the kinematics. The wheel camber, extracted from the kinematics, was expressed as a function of steering angle and suspension parameters in general case. The movement of the ground-contact point along the tyre perimeter was also taken into account. The kinematics was developed without small-angle-approximation. Therefore, the kinematic model is applicable to the case of the variable caster. A practical mechanism for the variable caster was also suggested to introduce the idea of the task. The required kinematics of such suspensions is derived from the general case to provide a visual understanding. The kinematics was then validated by a multi-body model built in ADAMS software.


Keywords: variable caster; variable caster steering; kingpin inclination; kingpin axis; steerable tyre kinematics; side slip; lateral force; homogeneous transformation.

Language: en