雪上用Push-Pull Locomotionローバの車輪支持力の実験的検証

抄録

Snow removing, traveling, and working in the snow area is a hard job for the aged person. The aged people require simple and small-sized robots replacing their hard works. We apply a robot equipped with Push-Pull Locomotion (PPL) for solving these problems. PPL robot is unique locomotion and has a good traveling performance on loose soil. The traveling performance on the snow surface, unfortunately, has remained unclear for the PPL. To investigate this performance, this paper focuses on the interaction between an individual wheel and snow surface, which is the key aspect of the PPL traveling scheme, and investigates the sinking phenomenon and resistance force of the wheel. Experimental results revealed that the wheel can easy to sink into the snowfield, and the wheel can obtain the resistance force.