A Wheelchair Robot Design with Wheel-Track Coupling Mechanism and Motion Analysis

Combining the advantages of wheeled mobile robot and tracked mobile robot, a barrier-free wheelchair robot with wheel-track coupling mechanism is presented to solve the problem of common wheelchair limitations in obstacle surmounting. Firstly, wheel-track coupling mechanism of the wheelchair mobile platform with lesser space is mainly designed, and motion of this mechanism is analyzed based on rigid-body guidance and analytic geometry synthesis method. For the deformable structure, a new scale-style elastic segment track is developed, and then its motion modes, meshing method, and bionic characteristics are analyzed. At last, simulations and experiments of performance of transformation mechanism and wheelchair robot motion are carried out, and the results show that the designed mechanism is reasonable.