A novel design of Tri-star wheeled mobile robot for high obstacle climbing

Abstract

This paper proposed a novel Tri-star wheeled robot called “Tribot”, which targets on high obstacle performance in unstructured environments, especially at the performance for climbing vertical obstacles. Tribot equips with six Tri-star wheels and each wheel can be driven independently. The chassis of the Tribot is divided into two parts which are connected by an articulated mechanism, making the Tribot has a remarkable obstacle performance to adapt changing environments mechanically, without any interpolate complex control. Numerous experiments have been conducted for vertical obstacle performance tests. Although the diameter of the wheel of the Tribot is only 220 mm, the robot can climb over vertical obstacle of 450 mm high, twice more of the wheel diameter. All results show that Tribot has excellent vertical climbing performance in unstructured environments.