Development of falcon III: Terrain-adaptive body-stabilizing three-wheeled vehicle

With the appearance of many personal vehicles developed for urban environments, it seems pertinent to address the development of off-road personal vehicles as well. This paper discusses this exact topic, and proposes a three-wheeled configuration which stabilizes the horizontal posture of the vehicle´s driver in rough terrain. The merits of such a machine are examined; in addition, a mechanism here called sliding-rod-end is introduced, and the reasons for its use instead of regular rod ends are explained. A full-scale prototype of the machine was built and is briefly presented.