The operation capabilities of robot in the amphibious environments (such as shallow water fields, surf zones, and beaches) are critical for military and civilian. In this paper, we introduce a novel amphibious robot with wheelpropeller-leg integrated driving devices, developed by Shenyang Institute of Automation, which can realize both crawling locomotion on the ground and swimming locomotion in the water without changing its driving devices. This paper describes the design of the overall robot structure, the design of the novel driving devices, and the design of the embedded control system, respectively. All the driving devices of the robot are driven by independent motor, thus the amphibious robot can conveniently switch its locomotion modes according to the operational environments. The embedded control system is a distributed control system based on CAN bus, which makes it is easy to expend sensors and devices for the robot in the future. Finally, the hydrodynamic performances of the wheel-propeller device are analyzed by using CFX hydrodynamic calculation software, and some primary experiments have been done for verifying the fundamental locomotion functions of the robot.

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A wheel-propeller-leg integrated amphibious robot with multi-modes motion is presented as a new type of robot, which can both crawl on land and swim underwater in certain depth. The performance of swimming with the mixed thrusters composed of wheel-propellers and legs shows its propulsive capability when the robot swims in water. Based on analysis of propulsive principle of the wheel-propeller and the leg, hydrodynamic characters of the mixed thrusters are calculated, and the approximate models for propulsion of the wheelpropeller and leg are obtained according to computational calculation and simulation with commercial software. Considering the feature of energy-taking by itself, the optimal distribution of propulsion based on the wheel-propeller-leg mixed thrusters with the maximal navigational distance is studied using multi-objective optimization theory. As a result, the optimized driving parameters for the mixed thrusters are achieved to bring the maximal propulsion while consuming the minimal energy. Experiments carried out in the pool prove the validity and rationality of the optimization results.