By Hyun Young Yi, Daewoung Kim and Jack Kim
DAEJEON, South Korea (Reuters) – Imagine a wheelchair with flexible wheels that can navigate all kinds of obstacles from curbs to humps and even stairs.
Or maybe a self-driving delivery vehicle that uses the same wheels that take stairs to deliver food and groceries right to your stop.
This is what researchers from the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM) think about their ‘morphing’ wheel, which can roll over obstacles up to 1.3 times the length of its diameter.
Driven by the pressure of water droplets, they change from solid to liquid when they encounter obstacles.
Other possible applications include robots that scout the enemy on the battlefield.
The KIMM team hopes that morphing wheels will eventually be used with two- and four-legged robots, which currently have limited motion efficiency and can’t vibrate, to carry payloads that require stable motion in industrial settings.
“The goal is to make this work at speeds of up to 100 kph, or the speed of a normal car,” said Song Sung-hyuk, chief researcher at South Korea’s KIMM.
Tires developed for the same purpose as non-pneumatic or non-pneumatic tires are flexible but limited in their ability to overcome obstacles, said Song, a member of KIMM’s AI robotics research team.
The morphing wheel consists of the outer hoop of the chain and a series of spokes running through the hub. The stiffness of the spokes – and therefore the wheel – is automatically controlled by the sensor as it reacts to the terrain.
Song’s team showed Reuters a prototype wheelchair on morphing wheels as it ascended a flight of 18 cm steps with a life-size dummy sitting on it. The team also tested the wheel-mounted device at speeds of up to 30 kph.
The morphing wheel was the cover article of Science Robotics magazine in August.
(Reporting by Hyun Young Yi, Daewoung Kim and Jack Kim; Editing by Nicholas Yong)
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