Motorized personal vehicles, such as Dean Kamen's Segway and Toyota's i-REAL, have been developed for use on flat ground mainly within urban environments. However, there is also a demand for personal vehicles able to move through rough terrain. Forests and mountains, for instance, frequently have narrow passages and many natural obstacles (e.g. trees, large rocks) that prevent the use of conventional large off-road machines. In those situations, a compact personal vehicle could be of interest. This paper presents a three-wheeled configuration for such a vehicle, and discusses its stability in rough terrain. Moreover, its stability analysis was used to compute the actual values of some geometric parameters of the vehicle linkage as to maximize its stability in rough terrain.
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