Abstract
Transporting heavy packages while climbing stairs can be a very difficult or dangerous task. In situations where this task is frequently required such as construction sites, workers would use equipment such as a back rack for convenience, but still it becomes a difficult task as the weight increases. In this paper, we propose a stair climbing hand-carrying cart based on the rocker-bogie mechanism. We conduct an optimal design of the kinematic variables of the rocker-bogie mechanism for stable stair climbing using Taguchi methodology. Fluctuations and a tilted angle during stair climbing are considered to formulate the objective function. Three different shapes of typical stairs are selected as user conditions to determine a robust optimal solution. The results are verified by experiments using a testing set-up of three stair profiles, and the experimental results are compared with simulation. We expect that the results of this research can be applied to stair climbing robot design.
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Hee Seung Hong received his M. S. in the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University at 2000, and is working toward a Ph.D. His research interests include robotic platform design, optimization and control.
TaeWon Seo is an assistant professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering, Yeungnam University, Gyeongsan, Republic of Korea. He received the Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering, Seoul National University, in 2008. He was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Nanorobotics Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University, in 2009. His research interests include creative robotic platform design, control, optimization and motion planning.
Dongmok Kim received his M.S. in the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University in 2006 and received his Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Seoul National University in 2011. His research interests include climbing robotic platform design, optimization and control.
Sunho Kim is post-doctoral researcher in the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University where he received his Ph.D. in 2010. His research interests are robotic platform design and optimization.
Jongwon Kim is a professor in the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University, Korea. He received his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Seoul National University in 1978, and his M.S. degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from KAIST, Korea, in 1980. He received his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, in 1987. He worked with Daewoo Heavy Industry & Machinery, Korea, from 1980 to 1984. From 1987 to 1989, he was Director of the Central R&D Division at Daewoo Heavy Industry & Machinery. From 1989 to 1993, he was a Researcher at the Automation and Systems Research Institute at Seoul National University. His research interests include parallel mechanisms, Taguchi methodology, and field robots.
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Hong, H.S., Seo, T., Kim, D. et al. Optimal design of hand-carrying rocker-bogie mechanism for stair climbing. J Mech Sci Technol 27, 125–132 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-012-1212-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-012-1212-y