A Portable Six-Wheeled Mobile Robot With Reconfigurable Body and Self-Adaptable Obstacle-Climbing Mechanisms

Abstract

Mobile robots can replace rescuers in rescue and detection missions in complex and unstructured environments and draw the interest of many researchers. This paper presents a novel six-wheeled mobile robot with a reconfigurable body and self-adaptable obstacle-climbing mechanisms, which can reconfigure itself to three locomotion states to realize the advantages of terrain adaptability, obstacle crossing ability and portability. Design criteria and mechanical design of the proposed mobile robot are firstly presented, based on which the geometry of the robot is modelled and the geometric constraint, static conditions and motion stability condition for obstacle crossing of the robot are derived and formulated. Numerical simulations are then conducted to verify the geometric passing capability, static passing capability and motion stability and find feasible structure parameters of the robot in obstacle crossing. Further, a physical prototype of the proposed mobile robot is developed and integrated with mechatronic systems and remote control. Using the prototype, field experiments are carried out to verify the feasibility of the proposed design and theoretical derivations. The results show that the proposed mobile robot satisfies all the criteria set and is feasible for applications in disastrous rescuing scenarios.

State of the art and future trends in obstacle-surmounting unmanned ground vehicle configuration and dynamics

“…Modular design will also become the development trend of future UGV platform [122,123]. In other words, reconfigurable will be a trend of UGV platform in the future [124][125][126][127][128][129] (shown in Fig. 16).…”

A Bio-Inspired Adjustable Posture Quadruped Robot with Laterally Undulating Spine for Terradynamically Challenging Environments

“…Jiang et al [14] use a balance-rocker mechanism that helps the robot change its posture and adapt to different terrain conditions. Similarly, the sixwheeled mobile robot of Song et al [15] makes use of a Sarrus-variant mechanism to reconfigure the robot body for terrain adaptability and obstacle crossing. The robot in [17] reconfigures its shape for overcoming obstacles by using a four-bar extension mechanism.…”