Study on Locomotion of a Crawling Robot for Adaptation to the Environment

With the marriage of biomimetics and robotics, there has been a new revolution in structure design and selection of gaits of robot, and thus the field of robotic application was broadly enlarged. Crawling robot as one type of biological inspired robot has been studied in the last forty years (Hirose, 1993). The main characteristics of the crawling robot is that it has low gravity center, narrow body section and many degrees of freedom, thus it has many types of locomotion for a higher adaptability to the environment. However, in spite of a wealth of research work on the realization of their locomotion of the crawling robots (Togawa et al., 2000; Yim et al., 2000; Burdick et al., 1993), there are very few concerning the improvement of the adaptation to the environment. Therefore, two main categories of work should be stressed on: one is improvement the adaptability of an existing type of locomotion for as many different environments as possible, and the other is to lay out a new efficient type of locomotion for a specially given environment. In our former researches (Chen et al., 2003; Chen et al., 2004) it is found that traveling wave locomotion is a widely used type of locomotion and getting over a vertical obstacle is a rigorous environment for a crawling robot. So in order to increase the environmental adaptability of a crawling robot, in this paper some studies are introduced and arranged as follows: Firstly, a new reconfigurable modular crawling robot has been developed, which can achieve some locomotion not only on a plane but also in a 3-dimensional space by different reconfiguration. Secondly, according to traveling wave locomotion, a good theoretical comprehension of this locomotion is represented based on its kinematics and dynamics analysis with the environment constrains. And some experiments are carried out to validate its high ability of environmental adaptation and improve motion efficiency. Thirdly, a new type of locomotion, namely rolling locomotion, is proposed to get over an obstacle. It is interesting that three kinds of lateral rolling locomotion are realized, through which a crawling robot can achieve net lateral translation, alternation of the contact subspace and crossing over some obstacles only with a few models . O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w .ite ch on lin e. co m