Practicality Evaluation of Noncircular Wheel "TFW" by a Wheeled Vehicle "SRIDER-II"

Wheels have high movement efficiency, simple structures and low cost. So various wheeled mechanisms are used in the living space. However, wheels have low traveling performance. Therefore, there are areas that wheeled mechanism can't move in. In order to solve this problem, various movement mechanisms are developed. Yet, they have many problems. For example, complicate, heavy, large, expensive, and so on. Because of these reasons, the spread of these movement mechanisms are blocked. Then, we propose TFW that have high performance of driving on level surface and traveling over a single step. Movement mechanisms that are equipped with TFW can travel over steps that conventional wheeled vehicle can't travel over. Consequently, we showed that TFW have high performance movement mechanism of level running and traveling over steps by experiments with a vehicle "SRIDER-II".