Abstract
Mobile robots that can survive in unstructured wildernesses is essential in many applications such as environment detecting and security surveillance. In many of these applications, it is highly desirable that the robot can adapt robustly to both terrestrial environment and aquatic environment, and translocate swiftly between various environments. A novel concept of amphibious spherical robot with fins is proposed in this paper, capable of both terrestrial locomotion and aquatic locomotion. Unlike the traditional amphibious robots, whose motions are commonly induced by propellers, legs or snake-like tandem joints, the proposed amphibious spherical robot utilizes the rolling motion of a spherical shell as the principal locomotion mode in the aquatic environment. Moreover, spinning motion of the spherical shell is used to steer the spherical robot efficiently and agilely; several fins are attached to the outer spherical shell as an assistance to the rolling motion. These two motion modes, rolling and spinning, can be used unchangeably in the terrestrial environment, leading to a compact and highly adaptive design of the robot. The work introduced in this paper brings in an innovative solution for the design of an amphibious robot.
Highlights
Amphibious robots are designed to cope with drudgeries involving miscellaneous terrains, such as lakes, wetlands, shallows and pipelines [1,2]
Compared with a robot moving only on land or underwater, which is stuck in the junction area between the land and the water, amphibious robots are capable of both aquatic locomotion and terrestrial locomotion, which are especially suitable for applications in unknown environments, potentially with complex terrains
Tasks calling for this kind of robots include environment detecting, wild exploring, security surveillance as well as scientific inspecting [3]
Summary
Amphibious robots are designed to cope with drudgeries involving miscellaneous terrains, such as lakes, wetlands, shallows and pipelines [1,2]. To make the snakelike robot to follow a desired path, a straight line path following controller is proposed by Kelasidi et al [10,11] Another type of amphibious robots is equipped with flippers that act as paddles in water and as legs on land. The relatively slow locomotion speed on the water due to frictionless spherical shell and the poor maneuverability are main hindrances in using a spherical robot as an amphibian To overcome these limitations, a novel amphibious spherical robot design is proposed in this paper, by attaching assistant fins to the outside surface of the spherical shell to increase its locomotion speed, and by using a combination of pendulum and rotator as the Inside Drive Unit (IDU) to propel the robot agilely.
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