Shape-Morphing Wheel Design and Analysis for Step Climbing in High Speed Locomotion

The ability of wheeled mobile robots to overcome steps is often limited by wheel size. Enhancing the ability of mobile robots to overcome obstacles is essential for extending their operation area, and many previous attempts have been made by using transformable wheels, a linkage mechanism, and a spo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE robotics and automation letters Vol. 5; no. 2; pp. 1976 - 1981
Main Authors Ryu, Sijun, Lee, Youngjoo, Seo, TaeWon
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Piscataway IEEE 01.04.2020
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects
Barriers
Centrifugal force
Design analysis
dynamic simulation
Energy conversion
Force
High speed
Kinetic energy
Linkage mechanisms
Locomotion
Low speed
Mobile robots
Morphing
obstacle-overcoming
Pneumatic systems
Robot dynamics
Robots
Shape
Springs
Transformable wheel
wheeled robot
Wheels
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Summary:The ability of wheeled mobile robots to overcome steps is often limited by wheel size. Enhancing the ability of mobile robots to overcome obstacles is essential for extending their operation area, and many previous attempts have been made by using transformable wheels, a linkage mechanism, and a spoke-type wheel-leg mechanism. In this study, we propose a shape-morphing wheel mechanism for step climbing at high speed. In the general case of low speed locomotion, a robot's wheels can be used normally. However, to overcome relatively large obstacles, the robot's wheels can extend its shape by using the proposed morphing mechanism with centrifugal force at high speed locomotion. Two modes of step climbing are analyzed that use kinetic energy conversion or impact on the steps. Detail design issues with comprehensive analyses results are presented. Results demonstrate that a robot with morphing wheels can climb a 46.67 mm obstacle at 1.82 m/s, which is 1.33 times larger than the wheel radius. We expect that this method can be applied to other locomotion modes of wheeled mobile robots.
ISSN:2377-3766
2377-3766
DOI:10.1109/LRA.2020.2970977