A Novel Modular Wheel-legged Mobile Robot with High Mobility

摘要

High maneuverability of mobile robots means their excellent ability to adapt to various terrains. Rolling and walking are the two common locomotion modes in currently existing mobile robots. Multiple locomotion modes in general means better mobility. How to integrate rolling and walking and easily switch between them has been being an interesting and challenging topic in development of mobile robots. In this paper, a novel wheel-legged robot, which is called Mobot-H, able to roll on diverse terrains and walk in biped mode is proposed. Designed by modular method, the proposed robot consists of a few joint modules in the middle and two wheel-footed modules at the two ends. Each wheel-footed module has two wheels, whose orientation can be changed by the conversion mechanism for different locomotion modes. The shape or configuration of the robot can also be changed by the motion of the joint modules in the middle. The flexibility of the main body and the wheel orientation enable high mobility of the presented mobile robot with the hybrid locomotion modes. The design and basic analysis of the robot is presented in the paper, the effectiveness and mobility of the proposed robot is preliminarily verified by experiments.