A Novel Small-scale Turtle-inspired Amphibious Spherical Robot
Huiming Xing, Shuxiang Guo, Liwei Shi, Xihuan Hou, Yu Liu, Huikang Liu, Yao Hu, Debin Xia
Abstract
This paper describes a novel small-scale turtle-inspired Amphibious Spherical Robot (ASRobot) to accomplish exploration tasks in the restricted environment, such as amphibious areas and narrow underwater cave. A Legged, Multi-Vectored Water-Jet Composite Propulsion Mechanism (LMVWCPM) is designed with four legs, one of which contains three connecting rod parts, one water-jet thruster and three joints driven by digital servos. Using this mechanism, the robot is able to walk like amphibious turtles on various terrains and swim flexibly in submarine environment. A simplified kinematic model is established to analyze crawling gaits. With simulation of the crawling gait, the driving torques of different joints contributed to the choice of servos and the size of links of legs. Then we also modeled the robot in water and proposed several underwater locomotion. In order to assess the performance of the proposed robot, a series of experiments were carried out in the lab pool and on flat ground using the prototype robot. Experiments results verified the effectiveness of LMVWCPM and the amphibious control approaches.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2019_anovelsmallscale,
title = {A Novel Small-scale Turtle-inspired Amphibious Spherical Robot},
author = {Huiming Xing and Shuxiang Guo and Liwei Shi and Xihuan Hou and Yu Liu and Huikang Liu and Yao Hu and Debin Xia and Zan Li},
booktitle = {IROS 2019},
year = {2019}
}