Design and Structure Analysis of Wheeled Chassis With Self-Balancing Rocker of Rescue Engineering Machinery

A wheeled chassis with self-balancing rocker is developed for rescue engineering machinery. This chassis has better ground adaptability compared with traditional ones because of the automatically adjustable ground clearance and body posture, non-trapezium steering mechanism, independent four-wheel steering, and “X”-type radiation legs. Finite element analysis on the chassis structure is done with two mechanical models and under typical finite element working conditions. HyperWorks software is used to analyze different parts of the chassis, and the results are used for structure optimization. The rocker plate thickness and rocker frame topology are optimized using Optistruct. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of proposed optimization methods.