A wheeled mobile robot is here modelled as a planar rigid body that rides on an arbitrary number of wheels. The relationship between the rigid body motion of the robot and the steering and drive rates of wheels is developed. In particular, conditions are obtained that guarantee that rolling without skidding or sliding can occur. Explicit differential equations are derived to describe the rigid ...

Wheels of planetary rovers typically have grousers on their surface to provide grip for climbing in loose soil and scrambling over rough terrain. In this study, the influence of grousers on the traveling performances of wheeled rovers is evaluated in various soils. First, the influence of the number of grousers was quantitatively determined by conducting experiments using wheels with different ...

Based on heavy aircraft main landing gear tires touchdown skidding process, patents have been registered since the 1940s to improve tire safety, decrease the substantial wear and smoke that results from every landing by spinning the rear wheels before touchdown. A single wheel has been modeled as a mass-spring-damper system using ANSYS mechanical transient simulation to analyze static and pre-r...

Two experiments involving object-manipulation tasks were performed to examine whether 1- to 2-year-olds form superordinate-like categories by attending to object parts. In Study 1, 14-, 18-, and 22-month-olds were tested with contrasts of animals, furniture, insects, and vehicles. Fourteen- and 18-month-olds behaved systematically toward categories with different parts (legs or wheels) but not ...

Using an Electric Differential (ED) in electric vehicle has many advantages such as flexibility and direct torque control of the wheels during cornering and risky maneuvers. Despite its reported successes and advantages, the ED has several problems limits its applicability, for instance, an increment of control loops and an increase of computational effort. In this paper, an electric differenti...

We show that, given a wheel with nonnegative edge lengths and pairs of terminals located on the wheel's outer cycle such that no two terminal pairs cross, then a path packing, i. e., a collection of edge disjoint paths connecting the given terminal pairs, of minimum length can be found in strongly polynomial time. Moreover, we exhibit for this case a system of linear inequalities that provides ...

This review article presents our accomplished work on the synthesis of molecular triptycene wheels and their introduction into nanovehicles such as wheelbarrows and nanocars, equipped with two and four wheels, respectively. The architecture of nanovehicles is based on polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which provide a potential cargo zone. Our strategy allowed us to obtain planar or curved nanoc...

This technical note describes a time-saving device for aligning the rear wheels of a racing wheelchair. The newly-developed analog alignment device is compared to the now standard discrete alignment device. The analog alignment device is found to reduce the time needed to align the rear wheels by nearly 75 percent, while increasing the accuracy of the alignment. The device does not noticeably a...

The nonholonomic motion planning problem is considered for a novel class of modular mobile manipulators, where each module is implemented as a planar parallel manipulator with idler wheels. This assembly is actuated by shape changes of its modules, which, under the in uence of the nonholonomic constraints on the wheels, induce a global snake{like motion of the assembly. The kinematics for a 2{ ...