Abstract
Conveyers are widely used in transportation and manufacturing fields. In case that a conveyed object requires changing its traveling direction, conventional systems used moving flippers, jack-up sliders, etc. Other systems using omnidirectional wheels or rollers with other actuators are also proposed. In contrast, a method using special roller mechanism is proposed in this paper. The mechanism called Partially Sliding Roller (PSR) has one active (or passive) rolling DOF and one semi-passive sliding DOF along rolling axis. Several PSRs can not only transport object but also shift actively to rolling axis direction with the passive DOF. The idea of PSR followed by models of proposed conveyer mechanism and brief experiments to evaluate the method are described.
