Abstract

Gaining high mobility on versatile terrains is a crucial target for designing a mobile robot toward tasks such as search and rescue, scientific exploration, and environment monitoring. Inspired by dextrous limb motion of animals, a novel form of locomotion has been established in our previous study, by proposing an eccentric paddle mechanism (ePaddle) for integrating paddling motion into a traditional wheeled mechanism. In this paper, prototypes of an ePaddle mechanism and an ePaddle-based quadruped robot are presented. Several locomotion modes, including wheeled rolling, legged crawling, legged race-walking, rotational paddling, oscillating paddling, and paddle-aided rolling, are experimentally verified on testbeds with fabricated prototypes. Experimental results confirm that paddle’s motion is useful in all the locomotion modes.

Highlights

  • As learned from realistic search and rescue activities at disaster sites, the mobility of the mobile robot is of the greatest importance [1]

  • The eccentric paddle mechanism (ePaddle) mechanism consists of a wheeled shell, a set of rigid paddles, a paddle-shaft, paddle-hinges, and wheel-rim-hinges

  • The ePaddle mechanism is able to insert the paddle into the soil earlier in the cycle and depart from the soil later to increase the drawbar pull and vertical force over a wider range

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Summary

Background

As learned from realistic search and rescue activities at disaster sites, the mobility of the mobile robot is of the greatest importance [1]. The locomotion mechanism of the robot should be able to adapt to diverse terrestrial, aquatic, and amphibious terrains. Dubbed WhegsTM IV [28], which is based on WhegsTM, has six wheel legs and is capable of walking in a tripod legged gait and swimming underwater Limited by their locomotion ability, above amphibious robots still cannot be applied for search and rescue tasks after tsunami, where multiple gaits on terrestrial, aquatic, and amphibious terrains are required. Five locomotion gaits (as shown in Fig. 2) have been proposed in our previous work, three of which are terrestrial gaits, namely the wheeled rolling gait [30], the legged walking gait [31, 32], and the legged-wheeled hybrid gait [33, 34]; and two of which are aquatic gaits, named the rotational paddling. Experimental results show that paddle-aided motion is useful for generating vectored thrusts in aquatic environment, for improving soil reaction forces on soft sandy terrain, and for enhancing obstacle-negotiating capability on rough terrains

Methods
Results and discussion
Conclusions

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