Optimal design and implementation of an amphibious bionic legged robot

Abstract

Amphibious bionic robots are a valuable tool in the field of marine engineering. In this paper, a novel multi-mode amphibious bionic legged robot is proposed. The unique mechanism design ensures that all joints of the robot will not rotate continuously but will reciprocating rotate under all working modes, which greatly reduces the probability of the robot losing motion ability due to the entanglement of aquatic plants and other organisms, making the robot more suitable for the amphibious environment comparing to traditional propulsion methods such as propellers and wheels. For an efficient walking leg mechanism design, a calculation approach for the kinematics of the leg was developed and integrated into an optimization algorithm with defined boundary conditions. 29.23% increase in stride length of walking leg after optimization. By the hydrodynamic simulation and the open water test in the circulating water channel, we tested and analyzed the influence of the geometric parameters of the swimming leg on the swimming performance, providing a reference for the development of this kind of robot. This paper provides sufficient technical details and completeness, and a series of performance evaluation experiments validated that this robot has excellent movement ability in the amphibious environment.