Analysis and Optimisation of a New Differential Steering Concept

• Main Author: Kuslits, Márton (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Germany Logos Verlag Berlin 2022
• Subjects: Technology, engineering, agriculture; Mechanical engineering & materials; Transport technology & trades; differential steering; multi-body system; steering control; steer-by-wire; multi-objective optimisation
• Online Access: DOAB: download the publication; DOAB: description of the publication

The emergence of electric drives opens up new opportunities in vehicle design. For example, powerful in-wheel motors pro -vide unprecedented flexibility in chassis design and are suitable for distributed drive solutions, although implying non-trivial vehicle dynamics control problems. This work aims at a new differential steering concept relying only on passive steering linkages where the necessary steering moment about the kingpins is generated by traction force differences produced by in-wheel motors. For the analysis of the proposed steering concept, a tailored multi-body system model is introduced along with the associated steering control system. In addition, this work explores the general applicability of such a new steering concept by using multi-objective optimisation. For this purpose, various design objectives and constraints are defined with respect to the dynamic, steady-state and low-speed steering performance of the vehicle. The resulting behaviour of the proposed steering concept is investigated by various simulation experiments demonstrating a comparable steering performance to that of conventional passenger cars.