Abstract
The inspection and maintenance of drains with varying heights necessitates a drain mapping robot with trained labour to maintain community hygiene and prevent the spread of diseases. For adapting to level changes and navigating in the narrow confined environments of drains, we developed a self-configurable hybrid robot, named Tarantula-II. The platform is a quadruped robot with hybrid locomotion and the ability to reconfigure to achieve variable height and width. It has four legs, and each leg is made of linear actuators and modular rolling wheel mechanisms with bi-directional movement. The platform has a fuzzy logic system for collision avoidance of the side wall in the drain environment. During level shifting, the platform achieves stability by using the pitch angle as the feedback from the inertial measuring unit (IMU) mounted on the platform. This feedback helps to adjust the accurate height of the platform. In this paper, we describe the detailed mechanical design and system architecture, kinematic models, control architecture, and stability of the platform. We deployed the platform both in a lab setting and in a real-time drain environment to demonstrate the wall collision avoidance, stability, and level shifting capabilities of the platform.
Highlights
In recent decades, the development of hybrid locomotion robots for various applications has increased
The combination of two or more kinds of locomotion increases the flexibility to reach a displacement goal given the needs of society, i.e., the NASA Athlete robot [1] for space exploration and robots used for defence, including [2], the lunar Rover
We tested the stability of the platform and the robustness of the adaptive control mechanism
Summary
The development of hybrid locomotion robots for various applications has increased. Some robots use hybrid locomotion to develop novel kinds of displacement for robotics, like the jumping robot Airhopper [5]. The interest in the study of areas of difficult access for human beings has been increasing, giving rise to various robot platforms, such as: pipe inspection robots [6] with multiple kinds of hybrid locomotion [7] for areas where humans cannot access [8]. Some hybrid robots have complex locomotion inspired from insects [11] due to the capacity of insects to reach complicated areas [12]
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