Road and off-road vehicle system dynamics. Understanding the future from the past

Abstract

A detailed analysis of scientific research directions and methods in ground vehicle dynamics and vehicle system dynamics during the past century is presented in this article. What started as peculiarities of vehicle motion, dynamics of vehicles went through extensive research and engineering work and was established as an applied science – vehicle dynamics. Steady motion and transient manoeuvres, multi-flexible-body dynamics, nonlinear and stochastic dynamics, terramechanics, vehicle operational properties and their multi-criterion optimisation, computer modelling and simulation, analysis and optimal synthesis, various controls, inverse vehicle dynamics, open architecture-type, and multi-domain vehicle systems – these are the milestones of developments over the past century. This article considers the subject-matter and the substance of vehicle dynamics in general, and new research directions of modern vehicle dynamics in particular. It is shown that modern vehicle dynamics is acquiring principally new features including agile dynamics of multi-physics mechatronic systems (including cyber-type systems), coupled and interactive vehicle system dynamics.