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.

In the present study, a scanning instrument to scan the whole circumference of an object and objects around a scanner and mirrors at once by a two-dimensional laser range scanner and mirrors is described. Laser reflecting points on the whole circumference of the object are gotten uniformly by eight mirrors. The construction and the function about the scanning instrument were shown. Coordinates and angles of the mirrors, trajectories of the laser, installation conditions of the mirrors, scanning area without the mirrors, and coordinates of the laser reflecting points on the surface of the objects were designed on the basis of the coordinate systems. Experimental equipment using an actual scanner and actual mirrors was built to evaluate the performance of the scanning instrument, and experiments were conducted. The error and the standard deviation of the distance from the scanner to the object in the case of the scanning with the mirrors were larger than in the case of the scanning without the mirrors. The whole circumference of the object and the objects around the scanner and the mirrors were identified from the assembly of the laser reflecting point. The errors of the coordinate values of the laser reflecting point were effective to grasp the object by a gripper.