Improving Maintainability and Reducing Noise of Ball Wheel Drive for Tourism Facilities

Abstract

In the future, the demand for service robots is expected to increase in Japan. It is considered that the hotel monitoring and guiding robots will be useful in the tourism industry of Okinawa. Vehicles using the Ball Wheel Drive mechanism have a better climbing ability for step and gap and on slopes than the conventional omnidirectional mobile vehicles which use the Omni Wheels. We developed a prototype and demonstrated its usefulness through experiments. The previous prototype uses ball casters for the ball holding mechanism because it is easy to design. However, if the surface of ball caster is damaged, noise is generated. In this paper, we propose a new prototype that uses universal casters for the ball holding mechanism to reduce noise during traveling.