Curved-Spoke Tri-Wheel Mechanism for Fast Stair-Climbing

Stairs are common obstacles in indoor environments and are difficult to overcome for robots. The speed of robot stair-climbing should be similar to that of humans for commercial products, but their speed remains limited. Additionally, the variety of dimensions of stairs is also a significant problem...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE access 2019, Vol.7, p.173766-173773
Main Authors: Kim, Youngsoo, Kim, Jongwon, Kim, Hwa Soo, Seo, Taewon
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Climbing
Coefficient of friction
friction coefficient
Indoor environments
indoor service robot
kinematic design
Kinematics
Legged locomotion
Robots
Robustness
Service robots
Stair-climbing
Static analysis
tri-wheel
Wheels
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Summary:Stairs are common obstacles in indoor environments and are difficult to overcome for robots. The speed of robot stair-climbing should be similar to that of humans for commercial products, but their speed remains limited. Additionally, the variety of dimensions of stairs is also a significant problem for robust stair-climbing by robots. In this paper, a curved spoke-based tri-wheel mechanism is proposed for fast and robust stair-climbing. The goal speed of stair-climbing is similar to the human speed for variously sized stairs. The proposed wheel system is composed of a tri-wheel mechanism with a curved spoke, wherein the dimensions of the mechanism are determined based on a kinematic analysis. Between the tri-wheels, a stopper mechanism acts to make the initial condition of the sequential stair-climbing the same as the initial starting condition. Static analysis to analyze the minimum friction coefficient is performed to verify the performance of the robot. Experiments based on the prototype are performed to verify the stair-climbing speed for variously sized stairs; the results indicate that fast and robust stair climbing performance is achieved. These findings can be used to design an indoor service robot for various applications.
ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2956163