Get the robots flexible and Torqued even with wheels origami

Origami, the art of folding a sheet of paper to create shapes, the concept is attractive to robots because you can convert two-dimensional materials into three-dimensional structures that are inherently flexible, or, robots have to say, "deformation" . Moreover, the structures that fold and unfold allow all kinds of interesting work that would otherwise not be possible with systems that are more complex than that.

Approach may be particularly useful in the design of robots wheels, and earlier this month at an international conference on the IEEE Robotics and Automation (ICRA) has provided research groups of two wheels inspired by the origami that allows mobile robots to be characterized by a more agile and powerful design.

He was part of a group of laboratory BioRobotics Seoul National University, led by Professor Qiu Jin Zhou. The researchers designed an intelligent robotic wheel there on the basis of one of the most famous origami models, the model of the magic ball.

They created the wheel can change the radius by distorting its shape. This trick is useful to be able to do, since the wheel of a large radius is the best things to climb, while the radius of the smaller wheel is the best in things under pressure, as shown in Android



Steering and hooks together can distort the minimum diameter of 55 mm and a diameter of 120 mm max, which is a large group, especially since the switch requires only one motor for each wheel.

"Model wheel drive origami Manufacturing is a part of the fabric and its application to deformation mobile robot," according to Dae-Jung Lee, Ji Suk Kim, Jae-Jun Park, Sa Reum Kim, and Kyu Jin Cho , the Seoul National University, presented this month at the ICRA 2014 Hong Kong.

In another project submitted to the ICRA and researchers in the laboratory of Microrobotics Harvard, led by Professor Robert Wood, and worked with a team of Seoul National University to design origami wheels that can expand and shrink automatically.

In this case, the objective was not only to allow the robot to climb some things and other things under pressure. Because there is a direct relationship between the radius of the wheel and the torque which can be practiced, a wheel that can be deformed can also be used as automatic transmission CVT.

First, a word (to the word) for transmission: the most general sense, and the transfer is the thing that turns the power output of the engine to the combination of speed and torque. Usually the way it works is that you can transfer exchange rate pair (or vice versa), while improving the efficiency of your cars: cars, low speed gives you a lot of torque, but limits the maximum speed while giving a top speed torque to let you go faster.

Most cars have a separate gear box, where you can choose a certain number of fixed gear ratios. Inevitably, this means that most of the time, does not transfer optimal for what you want to do. The continuously variable transmission, on the other hand, offers an infinite number of gear ratios and the fixed bearing.

Unlike most cars, most robots do not bother to send any because they are heavy and complex. This means that the robots must be designed either to move quickly (which does not require a lot of torque), or stuff mail (who does not), but it is not great to do both.

The researchers designed the wheel of origami that can do both, simply by changing the radius, through the design of origami, it does so on its own. This is the CVT fully automatic, allowing the robot to move things quickly or spaces without the need for additional complexity behind the wheel of origami:

There are three robots in the video below. There is a constant with large wheels (high speed, low torque), and the other with small fixed wheels (low speed, high torque) and one with wheels that can be expansion and contraction origami. Any amendments necessary: If the wheels have a lot of origami pregnancy rotation, and procrastination, and also continues to wheel hubs to convert, and the collapse of the wheels, which increases the torque of their own so that they can move:



To repeat, the continuously variable transmission at a time and fully automated. The wheel can adopt any effective dose of the transmission ratio between the minimum and maximum diameters were, and it is negative, such that the spring, because it meets the load on it by reducing the diameter to reach the maximum diameter that it can rotate downward.

Origami is the cost of the wheel 70 percent of the cost of a fixed diameter of the wheel, and less than what it costs to hire someone who knows what they are doing to bend for you. The researchers suggest that it would be also ideal for applications where weight and size are issues such as the Rovers between planets, and the wheel can be bent and spread.

"One, origami inspired negative - continuously variable transmission," Samuel M. Felton, Dai Yong Lee, Jin-Kyu Cho, and Robert J. Wood, Harvard University and Seoul National University and presented this month in 2014 in Hong Kong ICRA.