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Two-Degrees-of-Freedom Transformable Wheel

CSEF · 2023 Applied Mechanics & Structures First Award

Fu Chengyu · 11

Overview

Transportation has always been crucial to urban development. In the future, in “smart cities” where automated robots become highly involved with urban living by taking on laborious tasks for humans, the ability to adapt to complicated urban terrains becomes crucial for automated machines. Since their invention in the prehistoric age, wheels have been commonly used in ground transportation due to their high efficiency in navigating through plain surfaces. However, any obstacles with vertical elevation can cause big problems for the platform that moves on wheels. The transformable wheel provides a possible solution to the problem as they adapt to different landscapes by changing their exteriors. This study presents an improved design for modular transformable wheels that can overcome vertical obstacles. These transformable wheels can adapt to city landscapes such as stairs and thresholds on sidewalks. They can be applied on service robots, wheelchairs, and transportation, therefore playing essential roles in the IoT and future city care systems. The paper introduces the mechanism of the transformable wheel. Each modular wheel has a Two-Degree- Of-Freedom transformation mechanism, composed of a 7-bar linkage with six rotational joints and one prismatic joint. A related study improving the efficiency in overcoming obstacles by changing the conditions of the contact surfaces is presented together with field experiments, which conclude that the transformable wheels succeed in overcoming common obstacles such as stairs, curbs, and sidewalks in real-life scenarios. However, the design of the model chassis still requires further improvement to achieve the function of climbing multiple stairs continuously.

Source coverage

This record comes from a published award list, not a complete project archive. Its abstract comes from CSEF's public project showcase as archived by the Internet Archive before judging (https://web.archive.org/web/20230401224130/https://ca-csef.zfairs.com/showcase/ShowcaseInfo?f=838e60b7-ea75-46e8-865c-fde4864244b3); the version presented may differ.

Awards (1)

Competition history

  • CSEF 2023 Applied Mechanics & Structures · Entry S0308

Resources

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