Legway: Design and Development of a Transformable Wheel-Leg Hybrid robot

Abstract

This study aims to develop a wheel-legged hybrid robot that combines the advantages of a humanoid robot and wheeled mobile robots. In this study, a transformation mechanism for the wheel-leg hybrid robot that does not require additional actuators, enabling efficient switching between wheel mode and leg mode, was developed. The developed mechanism provides leg mode for rough terrain walking, wheel mode for high-speed locomotion, and station mode for stable stationary situations. Considering the limited range of motion of the five-bar linkage based mechanism, the link lengths were optimized. Also, three states along with state transition algorithms were defined by a Finite State Machine. Finally, the performance of the developed wheel-legged hybrid robot and mode transition algorithms were verified through simulations, and the feasibility of the proposed system was confirmed through experiments using the real robot.