The Articulated Wheeled Vehicle (AWV) paradigm examines a class of wheeled vehicles where the chassis is connected via articulated chains to a set of ground-contact wheels. Activelyor passivelycontrolled articulations can help alter wheel placement with respect to chassis during locomotion, endowing the vehicle with significant reconfigurability and redundancy. The ensuing ‘leg-wheeled’ systems...

The control problem for wheeled systems similar to a mobile robot, a vehicle, a wheeled tractor, etc. is studied. These systems belong to the class of nonholonomic mechanical systems. Analysis in this paper is limited to kinematic models, and the dynamics of control drives is taken into account. Control that stabilizes the motion of a wheeled system along a given trajectory (planar smooth curve...

The United States Army began developing Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) in the early 1900’s. Concurrently, researchers developed and enhanced passenger and commercial ground vehicles. Although significant progress has been made for improving vehicle mobility for all ground vehicles throughout the past century, mobility has lacked a concise mutually agreed definition and analytical standardized c...

INTRODUCTION The risk of collision between pedestrians and powered two-wheelers is poorly understood today. The objective of this research is to determine the risk for powered two-wheeler drivers of hitting and injuring a pedestrian per kilometer driven in towns and to compare this risk with that run by four-wheeled vehicle drivers. METHOD Using the bodily injury accidents recorded by the pol...

The Articulated Wheeled Vehicle (AWV) paradigm examines a class of wheeled vehicles where the chassis is connected via articulated chains to a set of ground-contact wheels. Activelyor passivelycontrolled articulations can help alter wheel placement with respect to chassis during locomotion, endowing the vehicle with significant reconfigurability and redundancy. The ensuing ‘leg-wheeled’ systems...

This paper presents the application of Buckingham’s π theorem to scale the powertrain of a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) by deriving non dimensional ratios called π parameters. A Hardware In the Loop (HIL) setup is constructed and the resulting longitudinal dynamics of the scaled vehicle are validated against those of a full scale vehicle model. This is performed with the u...

In the framework of the Technological Research and Development Program (TRP) of the European Space Agency (ESA), efforts have been under way to prepare key technologies for future small mobile vehicles to be used on planetary landing missions. One of these is the MIDD activity (Mobile Instrument Deployment Device) which aims at producing mechanical components and system concepts for such vehicl...

A robust tracking control design for wheeled vehicle systems with trailer, based on adaptive fuzzy elimination technique, is proposed in this study. A minimax control equipped with adaptive fuzzy elimination scheme is used to achieve a robust tracking performance, despite the system uncertainties and external disturbance. The design procedure is divided into three steps. First, a nominal wheele...

We describe in detail a novel kinematic simulation of a three-wheeled mobile robot moving on extremely uneven terrain. The purpose of this simulation is to test a new concept, called Passive Variable Camber (PVC), for reducing undesirable wheel slip. PVC adds an extra degree of freedom at each wheel/platform joint, thereby allowing the wheel to tilt laterally. This extra motion allows the vehic...