Posture analysis of a dual-crawler-driven robot

Abstract

This paper introduces a tracked robot composed of the proposed crawler mechanism, which uses a planetary gear reducer as the power transmission device and provides two types of output in different form with only one actuator. The robot that has two crawler modules can generate several postures by controlling cooperatively the two actuators. This tracked robot, which uses two actuators to give four outputs, however could have less realizable postures than that where outputs are given by the same number of actuators with the outputs. To find what postures can be generated by the introduced dual-crawler robot or all possible postures of this robot, the static analysis of the robot has been conducted and the possible postures are derived numerically in this paper.