Study on omnidirectional driving mechanisms to realize holonomic power transmission

We have been studying various types of omnidirectional driving mechanisms to realize holonomic power transmission for robotic manipulators and omnidirectional vehicles. These mechanisms have the same principle to realize holonomic power transmission. This principle of power transmission needs the mechanism with the active part and the passive part, and these active and passive parts should be perpendicular to each other. When the active part provides thrust to one direction, the passive part moves in the perpendicular direction to it smoothly without large frictional resistance. The omnidirectional wheel mechanism with the disc structure and the gear mechanism with passive rollers, that are introduced in this paper, move with the same principle described above. In this paper, we show the possibility of this locomotion principle and the development process with the spiral up approach to realize the novel omnidirectional power transmission functions for various applications.

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