Omnidirectional vehicles have been traditionally designed to operate on smooth/hard/flat surfaces. Very little effort has been dedicated for developing such vehicles for moving on complex rough terrains such as rocky surfaces. The maneuverability provided by omni-directional vehicles can be further utilized in numerous outdoors applications such as search and rescue missions, military activities, and planetary explorations. In this paper a novel design of omnidirectional wheels based on mecanum wheels and its complex rollers' design is considered. The new design concepts of such wheels capable of overcoming obstacles during the sideways motion of the vehicle, which is not possible using traditional mecanum and other wheels, are presented. Recently, traditional mecanum wheels have been tested on rough terrains. The conducted studies have reveal the main problems associated with such wheels when traversing on different grades of dirt (e.g., clay, sand) under diverse loads and roller angles. The biggest challenge has been found to be the inability to overcome obstacles during the lateral motion and their inability to move laterally in sand, as the sand or dirt piles up on the side of the vehicle preventing the vehicle form moving after the dirt pile reaches a certain height w.r.t. the wheel and roller diameters. As a result of these studies, our previous work was to design and control an omnidirectional wheel that would overcome these problems. The main objective was to design a wheel that could overcome the problems associated when moving on rough terrains while providing the same level of (smooth) motion as a traditional mecanum wheel moving on flat hard surfaces. As a result, our preliminary work has resulted in two new designs, both of which use the principle of "stepping over" obstacles as the wheel rotates and moves laterally w.r.t. the vehicle's chassis. The first design, herein referred to as elliptical mecanum double wheel (EMDW), is a more complex design but can step over bigger objects compared to the second design, referred herein to as semicircular mecanum double wheel (SMDW). This paper extends our previous work on two modified designs of Mecanum wheels having elliptical and semi-circular designs targeted for precise omni-directional navigation on rough terrains. The paper presents the mathematical formulations used in the design of the corresponding rollers which differs from the traditional Mecanum wheel rollers. The wheels proposed here are advantageous for overcoming obstacles up to 75% of the overall wheel diameter in lateral motion which significantly facilitates the lateral motion of vehicles on hard rough surfaces and soft soils which cannot be achieved using other omnidirectional wheels.


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    Title :

    Elliptical double mecanum wheels for autonomously traversing rough terrains


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    2010


    Size :

    6 Seiten, 10 Bilder, 7 Quellen



    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Print


    Language :

    English




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