Research on the Decoupling of the Parallel Vehicle Tilting and Steering Mechanism

Abstract

Active tilting vehicles tilt to the inside of the corner when the vehicle is steering. The tilting motion improves the steering and roll stability of the vehicle. The steering mechanism and the tilting mechanism of the vehicle are connected in parallel. The transmission of the steering mechanism is influenced by the movements of the tilting mechanism. In order to solve this problem, a parallel mechanism is proposed in this paper. It consists of a spatial steering mechanism and a tilting mechanism in parallel. A mathematical model of the parallel mechanism with the wheel alignment parameters has been established. The model calculates the decoupling conditions of the parallel mechanism. In this study, a decoupling method for the parallel mechanism is proposed. A prototype of the parallel mechanism was designed according to the proposed method. The prototype was found to reduce the influence of vehicle tilting on the outer and inner wheel steering angles by up to 0.64% and 0.78%, respectively. The steering geometry correction rate of the prototype is between 1.198 and 0.961. The correctness of the model was verified by experimentation on the prototype. The proposed method can effectively decouple the tilting motion and steering motion of the vehicle and make the wheels on both sides satisfy the Ackerman steering condition.

Keywords

• parallel mechanism
• spatial steering mechanism
• tilting mechanism
• mechanism decoupling
• active tilting vehicle
• wheel alignment parameters