A Wheel-legged Mobile Robot with Adjustable Body Length for Rescue and Search

Abstract

A wheel-legged mobile robot platform, namely Land Devil Ray-2 (LDR-2), is proposed with adjustable body length. To obtain the influence of the parameters of the mechanism on the motion, the relationship between the length of the robot and the stability of obstacle crossing is analyzed. The robot platform builds a robot perception system based on cameras and other sensing devices, performing tasks such as exploration or search and rescue in complex terrain. The robot control system can control the robot to switch motion modes and extend and retract the tail according to obstacle parameters. After completing the analysis and design, a robot prototype is built, and its obstacle-crossing performance is tested. The experiment results show that the proposed robot significantly improves the obstacle crossing performance than similar wheel-legged robots. This method can perform tasks better in different working environments and has reference value for the design of search and rescue mobile robots.