Instant centre of rotation

Engineering Mechanics

Published in P.K. Jayasree, K Balan, V Rani, Practical Civil Engineering, 2021

The instant center of rotation is also called the instantaneous center or the instantaneous velocity center, or the instant center. It is the point fixed to a body which undergoes planar movement that has zero velocity at a particular instant of time. At this instant, the velocity vectors of the trajectories of other points in the body generate a circular field around this point which is identical to what is generated by a pure rotation.

A nonlinear dynamical approach to the path correction of multi-steering articulated vehicles

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Journal Information

Published in Vehicle System Dynamics, 2021

Francesco Sorge

The conventional configuration with δ2 ≡ δ3 ≡ 0 implies that the semi-trailer tail mainly runs inside the tractor path at low speeds. Actually, the sideslip angles tend to vanish for very low speeds and the wheels tend to roll on their planes. Assuming for simplicity that all wheels are ‘condensed’ in the midpoints Mi of their axles i and that the six wheels of the semi-trailer are mounted on the same axle (3m), and imposing that the normals to the wheel planes converge to the same instant centre of rotation C, three right-angled triangles may be identified, M1M2C, Q2M2C and Q2M3mC. This permits writing the following relation between the path radii r1=M1C and r3m=M3mC (kinematical off-tracking):

Instant centre of rotation

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Engineering Mechanics

A nonlinear dynamical approach to the path correction of multi-steering articulated vehicles