Modeling, validation and firing-on-the-move control of armored vehicles using active front-wheel steering

Abstract

It is a well-known fact that an armored vehicle will lose its directional stability when firing a large-caliber gun while moving. The instability is caused by the impulse force from firing, acting at the center of a weapons platform that produces a yaw moment at the center of gravity of the armored vehicle. In order to improve the stability, this paper introduces a firing-on-the-move technology for armored vehicles using an active front-wheel steering (AFS) system. The AFS system is proposed to maintain the directional stability of the armored vehicle by providing an electronically controlled correction to the steering mechanism. The steering correction is designed to reject the unwanted yaw motion and bring the vehicle back to its intended direction of travel after firing. The proposed control strategy of the AFS system in this study consists of yaw rate feedback with lateral force rejection control. The AFS system controller is developed on a validated 10-degrees-of-freedom armored vehicle. The results indicate that the developed control strategy can effectively maintain the directional stability, in terms of yaw and lateral motions, of the armored vehicle after firing. The superiority of the proposed AFS system controller is also evaluated by comparing its performance to an AFS system without lateral force rejection control as well as to a conventional armored vehicle without AFS.

Identification of an optimum control algorithm to reject unwanted yaw effect on wheeled armored vehicle due to the recoil force

“…M z is the tire alignment moment from Pacejka's Magic tire model. The detailed derivation and validation of the steering model can be obtained from Aparow et al 17 The validation of armored vehicle is shown in the work by Kadir et al 18 …”

“…The simulation was performed for a period range of 5-10 s using Runge-Kutta solver with a fixed step size of 0.001 s. The numerical values of the 17-DOF wheeled armored vehicle model parameters are set based on Kadir et al, 18 while the gun model parameters are based on 75 mm KwK 42 caliber size 7 as shown in Table 3.…”

“…where F zfl , F zfr , F zrl , and F zrr are the normal forces; F dfl , F dfr , F drl , and F drr are the damper forces; F sfl , F sfr , F srl , and F srr are the spring forces acting in the vertical direction of the armored vehicle. The detailed description of the 7-DOF ride model is described in the work by Kadir et al 18 Pacejka's ''Magic'' tire model…”