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Every which way forklift

Needs funny wheels at an angle to avoid skidding when moving the wheels round to go in a different direction. Very clever to sort out an arrangement where the wheels run cleanly round in circular path without moving the main truck.

I imagine weight capacity is much less than a conventional fork lift of similar size.

Clive
 
The specialized lift trucks that move long bundles of lumber and beams have been able to do that for years. They are too wide to travel forward between stacks of lumber so they travel sideways until they are centered to the load. Then they travel sideways again until they are clear and they can pivot around corners as needed. In appearance they resemble a "trailer wart" with outriggers.
 
There's another vid floating around YouTube that shows the same thing but a different design. On it, the wheels always turn the same direction but changes the geometry of the wheels themselves to change direction.

On either of these, I question the weight capacity of the wheels. It also doesn't look like they would work very well on anything but smooth concrete.
 
Funny - the high school First Robotics Challenge (FRC) guys have this all figured out. The forklift with "casters" on all four corners has what FRC calls a Swerve Drive, and the airtrax setup uses Mecanum wheels.

There is an SF Bay Area FRC team that controls a swerve drive with a joystick for direction and a DJ platter for rotation of the robot. It is very slick. The bot has a gyro so it knows which direction it is pointed, and the swerve drives have encoders for wheel speed and steer angle. There is also a homing microswitch on the steer mechanism, which functions like homing a CNC on power-up, so the steering encoders have a reference from which to count.
 
Looking further into this I now see the capacity is more than I would have guessed.... the "2T" stands for two tons....which, even if metric tons would be over 4,200 lb capacity. Still can find no hint of the price. Filled out the quote form just for the heck of it and will see if they respond. Hope they don't pull the Linde trick and use some weird ass battery voltage like 72 volts as even a standard 36 volt battery would be bad enough, price wise.

Milacron
 
If they would apply this technology to automobiles parallel parking would be a breeze.

Bob
WB8NQW

1.Parallel parking already is a breeze with the appropriate option...in fact just having a rear camera makes a world of difference.

2. I don't see how a vehicle with this wheel system could go even remotely fast enough to match that needed by automobiles, not to mention suspension issues and tire wear

parallel parking options - - Yahoo Video Search Results
 








 
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