We could try to make public spaces more accessible and allow everyone, able-bodied or disabled, to move around without having to ask questions. But no, we’re going to keep the steps at the entrance to the city hall and count on the genius of South Korean researchers to find a way to get over them in a wheelchair, as an article from TechCrunch tells us.
Researchers at the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM) unveiled a prototype of a robotic wheelchair equipped with deformable wheels in early September. The device is intended to enable people with reduced mobility to overcome most obstacles that prevent wheelchairs from moving, including stairs. The presentation is accompanied by a publication in the journal Science Robotics that details the project.
The idea adopted by the researchers is that of a wheel capable of being rigid on a smooth course and becoming “soft” to pass obstacles. The part in contact with the ground is a more or less taut chain. If necessary, it takes the shape of the obstacle it encounters, before returning to its initial shape once back on the flat. It’s ingenious.
This is not the first time, recalls Sung-Hyuk Song, an engineer at KIMM and the main architect of this project, that shock-absorbing wheels have been tested. But this idea of a “smart chain” should be able to overcome the performance and stability problems that have accompanied these devices until now.
The memory of the shape of water
The South Korean engineering team specifies that this project is inspired by the surface tension properties of water droplets. This phenomenon explains the shape of liquid droplets. Despite their ability to deform easily, water droplets will systematically tend towards a spherical shape by the cohesive forces of…
- Slate.fr
