Study on Airless Variable Rigid Wheel to Travel Rigid and Loose Surface for UGV

The vehicle on disaster areas has risks of the puncture at traversing the ground with debris and is easy to stack at traveling on loose soil. The special wheel, therefore, are required to overcome these tasks. This study focuses on two kinds of condition to traveling for vehicle, “rigid surface” and “soften surface” like loose soil. The travelling performance on these two conditions is quite different. The wheel is needed to adapt toward these conditions. In case of rigid surface, the rigid wheel is better because of the rolling resistance is small when one traverses. On the other hands, the flexible wheel is better to traverse loose soil. If the rigid wheel traverse loose soil, the slip behavior is easy to occur. From these knowledges, we develop the variable rigid wheel to adapt two different condition. Moreover, we report the experiments using the proposed wheel.