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Commercial vehicles must transport an increasing volume of freight on a relatively fixed infrastructure. Some of these vehicles are highly specialized and customized to perform particular tasks. One way to increase freight hauling efficiency is to allow longer vehicles with more axles. These vehicles will have different handling properties and must be driven on existing infrastructure. Longer term, autonomous-like vehicles could be used to increase vehicle utilization. In both cases characterizations of multi-axle vehicle dynamics are required. A two-dimensional yaw plane model is used in practice to analyze handling performance of two-axle passenger cars. Commonly known as the "bicycle" model because it combines all tire forces associated with a given axle to act on the centerline of the vehicle, the yaw plane model allows lateral velocity and yaw rate degrees of freedom.

Author Daniel E. Williams, an industry professional with more than 30 years of experience in chassis control systems from concept to launch, brings this experience and his unique approach to readers of Generalized Vehicle Dynamics. This book makes use of nomenclature and conventions not used in other texts. This combination allows the derivation of complex vehicles that roll with multiple axles, any of which can be steered, to be directly predicted by manipulation of a generalized model. Similarly the ride characteristics of such a generalized vehicle are derived. This means the vehicle dynamic behavior of these vehicles can be directly written from the results derived in this work, and there is no need to start from Newton's Second Law to create such insight. Using new and non-standard conventions allows wider applicability to complex vehicles, including autonomous vehicles. Generalized Vehicle Dynamics is divided into two main sections-ride and handling-with roll considered in both.