Design, Analysis and Development of Mobile Robot with Flip-Flop Motion Ability

Abstract

Abstract In this study, a mobile robotic system having the ability for flip-flop motion was designed and analyzed using CAD (Computer Aided Design) and CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) methods. The robot was designed to manufacture with FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) technique that is most common RP (Rapid Prototyping) methods. System was developed with 4 wheels and each wheel was connected to body with 4 motional legs. For the suspension and flip motion ability legs and body were connected to each other with 2 dashpots as up and down sides. Dynamic and structural analyses were conducted to determine the power and torque requirements of the system that can be used for actuator selection, to obtain the energy storage on the suspension system for flip-flop motion and to check the structural strength of the robot’s components. Ansys Rigid Body Dynamics and Static Structural tools were used. In the analyses, a concrete road with the length of 1,000 mm and 10° inclinations was created as ground to simulate the real world. Obstacles with the height of 80 mm were placed on different locations on the path of the wheels for the robot. The length of robot and the number of wheels were decreased to one half of the real to ease the analysis. It was obtained from the analyses results that safety factor values for whole body and critical component (suspension legs) were found as almost 2 and 0.8, respectively. From these results, a reinforcement process was required especially for suspension legs. Maximum equivalent stresses were also calculated as 14.7 and 27.2 MPa. From the rigid dynamic analysis, it was observed that the total power requirement of the system was about 300 Watt while it was driven with maximum speed 2m/s.