Development of the connected crawler robot for rough terrain - realization of the autonomous motions

The purpose of this paper is to develop a rough terrain mobile system. Our mobile system adopts the connected crawler mechanism. It had 3 connected stages with the motor-driven crawler tracks on each side. RC-servo motors were used for driving joints between the stages. This system also has a high mobility. In this paper, we showed the mechanical features, and proposed the operation strategies for autonomous motions. We have also made verification experiment of proposed operation strategy. For this verification, we did 2 types of experiment. One was that the robot passes over bumps with different heihgts. The other was stairs ascending. Both experiments had a great success. There were remarkable points in these experiments. These experiments showed that the robot can pass over the different height and different structual obstacles by using only (same) strategy. Moreover the sensors which realize proposed strategy were very simple, and the number of sensor was very small. Therefore it can be concluded that proposed strategy has extremely high usefulness.