A Transformable Wheel-Legged Mobile Robot

Abstract

This paper proposes a revolutionary new type of transformable wheel-legged mobile robot that can easily traverse both flat and rugged terrains. With its advanced wheel-legged design, this robot can traverse various terrain types with minimal additional effort on the user’s part. Its unique design also allows for greater flexibility in task execution and thus makes it highly applicable to multiple domains. It integrates the stability and maneuverability of a wheeled robot and obstacle climbing capability of the legged robot by means of a wheel-legged transformable mechanism. These two modes can be switched easily with two spokes touching terrain. In this paper, the motion analysis of the proposed robot under the wheeled, legged, and transformable modes is carried out after briefly introducing the concept and control system design. Then, the obstacle climbing strategies under wheeled and legged modes are obtained. Finally, a prototype of the proposed robot is designed and manufactured based on the simulation analysis. And the experiment results validate the effectiveness of the proposed transformable wheel-legged mobile robot.