Optimal Wheel Placement for 4-wheel drive

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Ether

Are each of the 4 wheels independently driven or are the front and rear wheels on each side chained (or belted) together?

It makes a difference in the analysis of turning forces.

If the wheels are independently driven with equal torque, a simple model with an analytical solution is possible.

If the wheels are chained, it can be solved using nonlinear constrained optimization. This can be done in Excel or a CAS such as Maxima, Octave, SciLab, Matlab, etc...

Due to changes made by the web host, many of the links in the above post are now broken.

So I collected everything together in one place and posted it here.