Design and Implementation of a Rolling Hovercraft for Amphibious Locomotions

Abstract

Environmental sampling and monitoring in the field are essential tasks for research and surveys. Enabled by the advancements of the robotic platform, aquatic and terrestrial tasks can be performed accordingly. For the tasks with both land and water area, multi-modal robots outperform mono-modal robots for their cross-domain locomotion ability between different media, and thus they can improve the exploration and monitoring coverage area. The challenges comprise actuators adaption in different working media, and the cross-domain locomotion efficiency. Therefore, this paper proposes a rolling hovercraft design and implementation to address the issues. For the actuators adaption in different environments, the proposed robot utilizes the same three ducted fans as its actuation system, and the ducted fans spin at high rotational speed in air to generate thrust in both land and aquatic mode. Besides, a cylindrical body hull works as a rolling wheel in land mode and as a floating hovercraft in aquatic mode. For locomotion efficiency, we implement a compact robot design with a proper allocation method of actuation units in land mode, aquatic mode, and the modes transition, which generalizes the actuators utilization efficiency. Specifically, for the land to aquatic mode transition, the center of gravity (COG) imbalance guarantees the actuation units above the water, and the robot works as a hovercraft. The prototype of the robots has been implemented, and the preliminary experiments verify its operations in cross-domain locomotion modes. The test trials ascertain our design objectives, and the results are promising for future field deployment and exploration or monitoring tasks.