Study on Locomotion of a Crawling Robot for Adaptation to the Environment

Abstract

The motivation of this research is to improve the locomotion adaptation to the environment of a crawling robot: Firstly, a new reconfigurable modular crawling robot has been developed, which can not only move on a plane but also achieve some 3-dimensional motions while reconfigured. Secondly, the kinematic analysis combined with dynamics is taken to revise the motion mechanism of traveling locomotion for better adaptation to the environment. It is found that the adaptability of locomotion is close related with the environment parameters and the body shape: when keeping the initial winding angle unchanged, the bigger the