花形展開機構と剛柔交互構成トレッドを有する可変剛性車輪の提案

抄録

A new wheel was proposed with the aim of developing a practical rescue robot. It is equipped with a hard and soft alternating tread and a petal-shaped expansion mechanism. Hard and soft alternating tread is hard to break and has flexible characteristics. Petal-shaped expansion mechanism can switch the characteristics of hardening and softening. Therefore, airless variable rigidity wheels were realized from these. Furthermore, the developed wheels were mounted on a 4-wheel UGV. Then, the running performance was verified by conducting a towing experiment in an environment simulating the disaster area. As a result, it was shown that the running performance was improved by switching the wheel mode.