2A1-N04 Omnidirectional Driving Unit Mechanism without Singular Line Realized by the Power Transmission between the Adjacent Belts(Mobile Robot with Special Mechanism(1))

Abstract

The spherical shaped cross-section crawler has been done in the previous research. The unit is featured by generating two orthogonal oriented driving forces by contacting of the external environment. However, the unit has the singular line on which the driving force cannot be transmitted. In this research, omnidirectonal crawler unit without singular line is proposed to cope with this issue. The crawler unit is composed of multiple arc-like crawler modules where each two pairs synchronously moves through the equivalent geared belt mechanism newly introduced. The prototype model is designed and developed. The basic motion of the prototype is confirmed experimentally.