Design and Fabrication of Soft Deformable Wheel Robot using Composite Materials and Shape Memory Alloy Coil Spring Actuators

In order to operate a search and rescue robot in hazardous area, the robot requires high mobility and adaptable locomotion for moving in unpredictable environments. In this paper, we propose the deformable soft wheel robot that can produce three kinds of driving modes; caterpillar driving mode, normal wheel driving mode, legged-wheel driving mode. The robot changes its driving mode as it faces the various obstacles such as a small gap, stairs etc. Soft film and composite materials are used for fabrication of deformable wheel structure and Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) coil spring actuators are attached on the structure as an artificial muscle. Film lamination and an composite manufacturing process is introduced and the robot design is required to be modified and compromised to applying the manufacturing process. The prototype is developed and tested for verifying feasibility of the deformable wheel locomotion.