Design of continuous alternate wheels for omnidirectional mobile robots

Most omnidirectional wheels with passive rollers have a gap between rollers. This gap causes the wheel to make discontinuous contact with the ground, and leads to vertical and/or horizontal vibrations. In this paper a novel design of continuous alternate wheel is proposed to minimize a gap between rollers. In the continuous alternate wheel, inner and outer rollers are arranged continuously, thus resulting in no gap between the rollers. This paper details the design process including the systematic approaches to determine the optimum number of rollers, the radii of rollers and the inclination angle of the inside of an outer roller for given design specifications. Finally, an actual continuous alternate wheel is constructed to verify validity of the design guidelines.