Author : A. Padma Rao and R. Venkatachalam

Steering plays a vital role in the proper functioning of any road vehicle. Even in the present era of electronics, the electronics could not enter the steering system because of various practical difficulties. Mechanical linkage provides foolproof, reliable and positive drive for the steering. Ackerman mechanism which is essentially a four bar linkage is popularly used in the automobile industry. Though this mechanism cannot provide perfect steering, it is widely used because of its simple constructional features. In this paper an attempt is made to develop a mechanism which may replace the Ackerman mechanism. The proposed mechanism is also purely mechanical, simple, reliable and gives steering better than Ackerman mechanism.

Key words: Steering, Ackerman mechanism, belt drive

Article published in International Conference on Advances in Mechanical Sciences 2014, Special Issue-2 (Feb 2014)