The article describes the process of development of an essentially new wheel suitable both for moving on flat ground and for travelling on stairs. The stair-climbing wheel is composed of rotary circular segments arranged around a shared carrier with arms to form a complete circular profile of the wheel adapted for moving on flat ground; for travelling on stairs, individual segments are rotated by an appropriate angle to touch down tangentially on the stepping surface of the stairs. The dimensions of individual segments, the centre of rotation of individual segments and the angle of their partial turn have been chosen so that the length of the arc along which the circular segment rolls is equal to the length of the stepping surface of an average stair, and, at the same time, the circular segment touches down tangentially on the stepping surface while the wheel turns around the edge of the previous segment. Using the rotation angle of the turnable segments, the wheel can be adapted to the height of non-standard stairs. The segments can be inclined in both directions for bidirectional movement of the wheel up and down the stairs. An undercarriage equipped with these wheels can be used in the field of exploratory robots and for the transportation of persons and materials on stairs.

Researchers often deal with the synthesis of the kinematic structure of a robotic manipulator to determine the optimal manipulator for a given task. This approach can lower the cost of the manipulator and allow it to achieve poses that might be unreachable by universal manipulators in an existing constrained environment. Numerical methods are broadly used to find the optimum design but they often require an estimated initial kinematic structure as input, especially if local-optimum-search algorithms are used. This paper presents four different algorithms for such an estimation using the standard Denavit–Hartenberg convention. Two of the algorithms are able to reach a given position and the other two can reach both position and orientation using Bézier splines approximation and vector algebra. The results are demonstrated with three chosen example poses and are evaluated by measuring manipulability and the total link length of the final kinematic structures.

The paper presents a practical implementation of a complex control system of a manipulator arm mounted on a mobile robot, controlled remotely by a human operator. Described is the mechanical construction and parameters of the manipulator, the overall structure of the control system and then in more detail also several software modules which were designed to aid the operator - including inverse kinematics and an anti-collision system. The control system is universal and has already been applied to several types of mobile manipulators.

This study examines selected components of the optimization function, used to evaluate the optimal kinematic structure of a robot for a given task. Automated generation of the kinematic structure is based on scalable drive modules of the joints and modules of the carrying arms with a check on the...

This article describes the process of designing and testing of shaped wheels for a mobile robotic stairclimbing system. It explains the basic principle of the shaped wheel and a synthesis of the shape and dimensions of the wheel segment for specified dimensions of the stairs. Before building a reduced prototype of a chassis with the designed wheels, simulations of its virtual model were performed in the ADAMS simulation environment. Functionality of the suggested solution was verified by building a prototype and its testing. The article is concluded with description of the achieved results and other research activities planned in the sphere of locomotive subsystems for stairclimbing.

The Sensitivity of the Input Impedance Parameters of Track Circuits to Changes in the Parameters of the Track