Wheels for Staircases

Our objective is to design innovative robot wheels capable of rolling on staircases, without sliding and without bouncing. This is the first step to reach the ultimate goal of building wheelchairs capable to overcome the obstacles imposed by staircases on people with limited mobility. We show that, given a staircase with equal steps, there is an infinite number of wheels that roll over it, with the constraints of no-sliding and no-bouncing. Some of these wheels appear to be very interesting for real applications. We also present an algorithm for the construction of a wheel, which depends only on the measures of the tread (the part of the staircase that is stepped on) and the riser (the vertical portion between each tread) of the step.