Development of Rimless Wheel with Controlled Wobbling Mass

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method for generating level-ground walking for a rimless wheel with a controlled wobbling mass. Our rimless wheel achieves level-ground walking by simply controlling the wobbling mass attached to the wheel. We mathematically demonstrate that the controlled wobbling mass generates propulsive effects for the rimless wheel. The walking speed of the rimless wheel can be changed by varying the amplitude of the wobbling mass: thus slow walking to high-speed walking can be realized for the wheel. Moreover, we have developed a robot based on a rimless wheel to show effectiveness of our proposed methods. We then analyze the walking properties with respect to the physical parameters and control parameters of our robot through numerical simulation.