Development of an Articulated Mobile Robot with Active Wheels and Manual Adaptation to Environment

Abstract

This paper presents an articulated mobile robot for urban search-and-rescue. The robot has active wheeled links connected by active joints, and is designed to move on various environments, e.g., plane, stairs, and narrow spaces. Moreover, this paper presents a method for three-dimensional locomotion which accomplishes that the body shape of an articulated mobile robot adapts to environment using its own weight. The adaptation to environment is obtained manually by making the joints passive. The experimental result demonstrates the effectiveness of a proposed method.