Policymakers, consumers and manufacturers are all agreed – the auto industry needs to adopt electrification to address climate change and dwindling natural resources – yet we still see very few hybrid and electric vehicles on the road today. Given the will is there, why the lack of adoption? In reality the main reason is not the technology, but rather the cost of developing the technology in th...

The wheel and rail interaction is the main influence on the dynamic response of a rail vehicle. Any changes in the wheel and rail will change the overall response of the vehicle. The condition monitoring challenge is to interpret these changes into useful condition information. This paper presents the results from initial feasibility studies into model-based condition monitoring at the wheel-ra...

Thanks to the development of electric motors and batteries, the performance of EV is greatly improved in the past few years. The most distinct advantage of an EV is the quick and precise torque response of the electric motors. A further merit of a 4 in-wheel-motor drived electric vehicle (4WD EV) is that, the driving/braking torque of each wheel is independently adjustable due to small but powe...

A wheel that is capable of producing thrust and maintaining vehicle internal integrity is presented. The wheel can be seen as an organic extension to the central unit (eg the vehicle) it is attached to, that is, the system and the wheel can be completely surrounded by the same tegument while enabling continuous wheel rotation without tearing the tegument. Furthermore, a skeleton linking the cen...

The dynamics of a railway vehicle are driven by the geometry and conditions at the wheel-rail contact. Typically the condition and shape of the wheel and rail are monitored separately and off-line. The work presented here is part of ongoing research into on-line modelbased estimation of parameters in the wheel-rail contact dynamics. This paper outlines a practical approach to estimating a nonli...

STUDY OBJECTIVE We assess the relationship between steering wheel deformity and serious thoracic or abdominal injury among drivers and front seat passengers involved in motor vehicle crashes, while adjusting for important crash factors. METHODS This was a national population-based cohort of adults involved in motor vehicle crashes from 1995 to 2002 and included in the National Automotive Samp...

Mobile robots are increasingly being used in challenging outdoor environments for applications that include construction, mining, agriculture, military and planetary exploration. In order to accomplish the planned task, it is critical that the motion control system ensure accuracy and robustness. The achievement of high performance on rough terrain is tightly connected with the minimization of ...

One common mobile robot design consists of three ‘omniwheels’ arranged at the vertices of an equilateral triangle, with wheel axles aligned with the rays from the center of the triangle to each wheel. Omniwheels, like standard wheels, are driven by the motors in a direction perpendicular to the wheel axle, but unlike standard wheels, can slip in a direction parallel to the axle. Unlike a steere...

Significant errors of train axle generators (tachometers) are due to wheel slip and slide. In this paper, an algorithm is designed to compensate for these errors. The algorithm identifies the wheel slip and slide by examining the variation of the processed vehicle longitudinal acceleration. Whenever wheel slip/slide is identified, then the vehicle speed is adjusted if a certain condition is met...

We have previously shown that cocaine enhances gene regulation in the sensorimotor striatum associated with procedural learning in a running-wheel paradigm. Here we assessed whether cocaine produces enduring modifications of learning-related changes in striatal neuron activity, using single-unit recordings in anesthetized rats 1 day after the wheel training. Spontaneous and cortically evoked sp...