Study on steerability of Tracked Vehicle

Abstract

This paper presents the equation of motion of a tracked vehicle with suspension equipments in order to study the lateral motions produced by steering control and its subsequent substantiation by means of scale model response tests.
The resulting agreement between theory and experiments was examined, and followed by consideration of the nature of the lateral response of the tracked vehicle to steering control.
As a result of the numerical analysis, the authors obtained the following conclusions.
1. In the study on rapid turning of tracked vehicles, the authors must use the mathematical model with a degree of freedom of rolling motion.
2. The radius at stationary circular turning increased rapidly when the outward shift of the location of the center of gravity of the vehicle incleased.
3. Trajectories in turning motion depended upon the initial velocity of the vehicles, at low speeds the radius of them increased as the velocity increased, but at high speeds they showed the oversteering characteristics.
4. The oversteering speeds decreased when the adhesion coefficient between tracks and ground decreased or the steering ratio increased.