Non-industrial stacker crane with compatibility/extensibility between manual operation and electrical driving

The goal of this research is development of a novel non-industrial stacker crane that enables humans to utilize high place for storage. Our proposing instrument has two features for cost reduction and easy-installation. One is a novel storage style that does not use shelves but uses specially designed wall hangers with high tolerance to positioning errors. The other is a mechanism configuration to utilize human abilities as driving source with a T-shaped timing belt and torque diodes, and they realize compatibility between manual operation and electrical driving in the common framework. That means the configuration has expansive capability to conform to changing user´s requirements and environments. In this paper, we develop a prototype of the non-industrial stacker crane, and execute experiments both in manual operation by a user and in automatic control by a motor. The experimental results confirm that the proposed stacker crane has enough compatibility between two operation modes, and demonstrate the validity of our novel storage style and mechanism configuration.