Design and Testing of Magnetic Wheels for the Mobile Robot

The main subject considered was to design and perform testing of magnetic wheels for a mobile robot. Such wheels, thanks to the magnetically generated pressing force, allow the mobile robot to move on vertical surfaces and even in an inverted position. Various sets of parameters were analyzed by means of static simulations in the Comsol software and experimental tests in the laboratory, which were the number and shape of the magnets, their position relative to the ground and the geometry of the test surface. The aim was to determine the values and compare the forces of attraction of the magnetic wheels. Nine types of wheels were proposed, of which three were selected for actual prototypes. All of them contained neodymium plate or cylindrical magnets. For selected variants from computer simulations, tests of real prototypes were carried out, which were two polylactide wheels with fourteen and twenty neodymium plate magnets and aluminum wheel with fourteen cylindrical magnets. The analyzed wheels were set across or along a smaller or larger tubular substrate or on a flat surface. Two cases of placing the magnets relative to the ground were also studied. In the first one, a single magnet was closest to the point of contact between the wheel and the steel surface. In the second case, these magnets were rotated by half the angle between the two closest ones. To sum up, the results obtained from static simulations and experimental tests prove that the type of substrate and the applied magnets have an impact on the obtained results.