Airtrax Reinvents The Wheel, Omni-Directionally
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Tuesday, 14 of August , 2007 at 1:55 am
By Evan Ackerman
Okay, so it’s a total cliche, but you’ve gotta admit that it’s about time for a better wheel, and the Airtrax omni-directional drive system is headed in the right direction, whatever that might be. The Airtrax wheels are Mecanum wheels, a design developed in 1973 and picked up by the US Navy for a while. Each wheel is comprised of a series of rollers, mounted so that their axis of rotation is 45 to the axis of the main wheel. As the wheels rotate in sync, the vehicle moves forwards or backwards normally, but by spinning pairs of wheels in opposite directions, the rollers enable sideways movement. Put it all together, and you can move laterally, diagonally, or spin in a circle.
Beyond the critical consumer benefits promised by the total elimination of parallel parking, Airtrax would be ideal for robots. Autonomous path-finding and obstacle avoidance is a tricky thing, but lateral freedom of movement would make things much simpler. It would also be ideal for robots that need to make quick changes of direction. Robots that feature controllability like this are called holonomic, and they’ve been quite successful at RoboCup events.
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Category: Industrial
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