Biologically inspired telescoping active suspension arm vehicle: Preliminary results

This paper proposes a new type of active suspension system for road vehicles. The paper addresses the design and analysis of the vehicle's suspension with the intent of later integrating this work into a fully functional prototype. The work presented here builds on a previous prototype built by the first author by adding telescoping suspension arms whose displacement can be actively controlled. This flexibility enables the vehicle to become more compact, or more stable depending on the situation. The advantages of the vehicle designed in this paper are twofold. First, it can potentially be used in several rough landscapes, such as other planets or debris caused by natural disasters. Second, the vehicle has the potential to be used in emerging countries where the infrastructure has not yet evolved to the point of acceptable performance for conventional vehicles.