The Design of an Aerial/Ground Dual-modal Mobile Robot for Exploring Complex Environments

Most of the robotic systems are restricted by their single locomotion when exploring the unknown complex environment. The inefficient energy utilization is the restriction to a flying robot, while the inferior capability of traversing rugged terrain limits the ground mobile robots. This paper proposes a novel design of a dual-modal mobile robot, which possesses aerial flight and ground movement abilities. It can traverse uneven terrain by flight mode and achieve efficient energy utilization by driving on the ground. We fabricate a prototype that contains a UAV configuration that suspends mobile chassis based on the above design conception, and verify the prototype's aerial/ground dual-modal movement capability and the hybrid locomotion efficiency by experiments.