Design of a Mobile Robot with Terrain-adaptive Mechanism for Three-dimensional Unstructured Environment

Mobile robots for search and rescue in disaster area demand high mobility on the 3D unstructured environments. Such robots have mostly employed hybrid locomotion combining advantages of wheels, legs, and caterpillars. This paper will present the two-phase terrain-adaptive mechanism with hybrid locomotion. First, the novel wheels, which consist of spokes and connecting tracks, can overcome obstacles smaller than wheel diameter. In addition, passive suspensions, designed through modifying planar four-bar linkage, adapt larger obstacles. Moreover, the robot is expected to have intelligence to percept the 3D terrain through measuring the passive linkage adaptation and to stabilize itself by control of the linkage configuration in the case of tip-over. The linkage mechanism has been evaluated through dynamic simulation.