Modeling and Simulating a Narrow Tilting Car Using Robotics Formalism

Abstract

Modeling and simulation are fundamental tools to develop new urban vehicles. The aim of this work is to model and simulate a narrow urban tilting car, which should significantly decrease traffic congestion, pollution, and parking problems. The structure of the vehicle contains closed kinematic chains. The modeling approach is based on the modified Denavit and Hartenberg description, which is commonly used in robotics, by considering the vehicle as a mobile robot composed of a multibody poly-articulated system in which the terminal links are the wheels. This description allows automatic calculating of the symbolic expressions of the geometric, kinematic, and dynamic models. A simulator is developed with MATLAB/Simulink, and the simulation of different scenarios is performed and analyzed.