Flexible Omnidirectional Driving Gear Mechanism with Adaptation Over Arbitrary Curvatures

A support structure for flexible displays such as OLED or flexible LEDs was developed using the flexible omni- directional driving gear mechanism. It is a gear mechanism hav- ing two degrees of freedom on one surface. This flexible display mechanism is expected to be placed inside a car dashboard as a human interface and for workspace optimization. In this study, we propose a novel flexible omnidirectional driving gear for supporting flexible displays discussing its design, motion range, repeatability, positional accuracy, and adaptability to any guide surface through magnetic coupling. The experiments showed satisfactory results for positional accuracy and repeatability with adaptability over a wide range of curvatures.