Wheeled vehicles are used daily because they have high movement efficiency, simple structures and low cost. However, their travel ranges may be limited due to the low traveling performance of wheels when they encounter a step. Variousmovement mechanisms have been developed to solve this issue, but they have become complicated and heavy in attempts to meet each design condition, so they are hard to use daily in some cases. The authors therefore devised a simple, low cost movement mechanism the TFW(Transformable Flexible Wheel) that can travel over a step without special controls. This is a noncircular wheel that can travel over a step without slipping by denting the outer circumference of the wheel when it comes into contact with a step and catching the step with the internal mechanism of the TFW. In this paper, the outline of the structure and movement of the TFW is discussed. In addition, its effectiveness is verified through the creation of two vehicles, the simple prototype SRIDERzero and the experimental model SRIDER, to prove that the traveling performance of the TFW over a step is superior to that of conventional wheels and to demonstrate the basic movements of the TFW.

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Wheels have high movement efficiency, simple structures and low cost. So various wheeled mechanisms are used in the living space. However, wheels have low traveling performance. Therefore, there are areas that wheeled mechanism can't move in. In order to solve this problem, various movement mechanisms are developed. Yet, they have many problems. For example, complicate, heavy, large, expensive, and so on. Because of these reasons, the spread of these movement mechanisms are blocked. Then, we propose TFW that have high performance of driving on level surface and traveling over a single step. Movement mechanisms that are equipped with TFW can travel over steps that conventional wheeled vehicle can't travel over. Consequently, we showed that TFW have high performance movement mechanism of level running and traveling over steps by experiments with a vehicle "SRIDER-II".