Driving Large Structures

The Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) is a high-rise building 81 m tall x 64 m wide in which H-IIA and H-IIB rockets can be simultaneously assembled.
Its front door consists of horizontal sliding double doors, which are opened and closed at a speed of 5 m/minute by a hydraulically driven traveling carriage.
Since the upper floors of the VAB are clean rooms, the doors are pulled inside and locked after they are closed, and then sealed so that there is no gap.
Due to their extremely large dimensions (67 m in height and 27 m in width), as well as their weight of 400 t, they have been registered as the world's largest doors in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Front Door of the Vehicle Assembly Building [Photo provided by: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency]

Sapporo Dome is a multi-purpose facility used for baseball games, soccer games, and various other events.
The dome had adopted a system in which the entire soccer field is moved outside when it is not being used for soccer games. To achieve this, we developed the world's first "hovering stage" system, which moves the field using only a small driving force while supporting roughly 90% of the field weight (8,300 t) by air pressure, thus contributing to a radical reduction in the time it takes to move it.
While the field moves 200 m on its 34 wheels, the system performs controls such as maintaining the pressure of the air supporting the field at a certain level and having the field travel straight by maintaining the lateral slip of the wheels to within ±100 mm.

Sapporo Dome "Hovering Stage"