Experimental study on the oscillating paddling gait of an ePaddle mechanism with flexible configuration

In this paper, a novel eccentric paddle locomotion mechanism (ePaddle) has been proposed to enhance the mobility of amphibious robots for multi-terrains tasks with diverse locomotion gaits. The oscillating paddling gait of the ePaddle mechanism enables the robot to perform stationary observation or attitude maneuvering operations in shallow water. To increase the thrust generated by this gait, the ePaddle mechanism has a flexible configuration, i.e. a flexible paddle and three rigid paddles. The effects of the oscillating amplitude and period of the gait to thrust are analyzed and compared with the thrusts measured with rigid configuration. Experimental results demonstrate that the flexible configuration is able to produce much more net thrust than the rigid configuration when the ePaddle is oscillating at large amplitude. Graphical Abstract

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