Development of a novel crawler for irregular terrain access

Abstract

We propose a novel (racked mechanism, called as "rotatory crawler", which can be applied to mobile robots in irregular environment. The foremost innovation in this crawler is that it adopts a planetary gear reducer and a triangular gear reducer as power transmission. The characters of the planetary gear reducer enable the crawler to provide two outputs in different form only by one actuator. The rotatory crawler can move on flat ground like a normal tracked vehicle, it also can overcome high obstacles such as steps or stairs by rotating its both sides of crawler units wholly.