A preliminary study to optimise safety conditions on a freight urban robotic vehicle

The paper presents a new concept architecture of light duty fully electric vehicle for efficient sustainable urban freight transport which allows the movement of two Euro Pallets 800 × 1200 mm (or boxes with similar bottom part). Active suspensions of the vehicle have been designed in order to adapt their stiffness to the payload on board and to modify the chassis height during loading-unloading tasks. In this paper, a preliminary study to optimise safety conditions on goods on board of the vehicle, and on people near the vehicle is presented. In order to guarantee safety conditions for the vehicle's driver and city areas where the vehicle should be moved, design optimisations on the chassis have been developed. These optimisations have been compared using computational analysis. Two alternative solutions have been proposed and one of the presented results has been included on the real vehicle.