2020 年 55 巻 2 号 p. 117-128
Promotion of barrier-free systems has been discussed actively because of the recent aging society, and more and more elevators and other devices have been installed in places such as large-scale public facilities and stations. However, it is difficult to apply barrier-free designs to every building to assist people’s mobility and smooth carriage of luggage. Especially stairs are the challenging place in terms of mobility. We consider a vehicle-type robot that can go up and down stairs is effective to solve this problem. Thus, in our study, we aimed to establish a technology which prevents the robot from sliding down stairs, and we proposed the wheel structure with the new C-shaped claw mechanism to adapt passively to shapes of steps. We also proposed the movement action principle that is less affected by the distance between the stair nosings. In this paper, we discuss the mechanical configuration and the mechanical design of the vehicle-type robots that we have developed, and report on the experiments.
