Production cars are designed to understeer and rarely do they oversteer. If a car could automatically compensate for an understeer/oversteer problem, the driver would enjoy nearly neutral steering under varying operating conditions. Four-wheel steering is a serious effort on the part of automotive design engineers to provide near-neutral steering. Also in situations like low speed cornering, ve...

Three-dimensional finite element analysis of soil interaction with a rigid wheel R.C. Chiroux , W.A. Foster Jr. *, C.E. Johnson , S.A. Shoop , R.L. Raper d a Aerospace Engineering Department, Auburn University, Alabama, 36849, USA b Agricultural Engineering Department, Auburn University, Alabama, 36849, USA c Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, Hanover, New Hampshire, 03755, USA d...

A generation method for the rail random irregularity with arbitrary wavelength interval (WI) is developed, and its accuracy and efficiency are demonstrated. Then a moving wheel-rail-bridge interaction element is derived to establish the finite element equations of motion for the train-rail-bridge interaction system, and the flow chart of assembly and calculation for the system equations is give...

Branch-width is a structural parameter very closely related to tree-width, but branch-width has an immediate generalization from graphs to matroids. We present an algorithm that, for a given matroid M of bounded branch-width t which is represented over a finite field, finds a branch decomposition of M of width at most 3t in cubic time. Then we show that the branch-width of M is a uniformly fixe...

Though much research has been conducted regarding traction of tires in soft granular terrain, little empirical data exist on the motion of soil particles beneath a tire. A novel experimentation and analysis technique has been developed to enable detailed investigation of robot interactions with granular soil. This technique, the Shear Interface Imaging Analysis method, provides visualization an...