A study of an omnidirectional robotic cart using passive wheels

This paper presents another type of robotic cart. In recent years there are a variety of power-assisted machines being researched. From them, robotic carts can help older people carry heavy objects easily and efficiently. Because of the similarity of conventional carts, they can be used in a variety of situations. However, robotic carts have the common mechanism that their wheels are driven directly by actuators. Because of that, energy efficiency is low, and those carts cannot move when battery power is low. As a result, older people are burdened by this disadvantage. To counter this, we tried to develop another type of robotic cart that has passive wheels instead of using regular active wheels. By using passive wheels, the robotic cart has high energy efficiency.