Latest Papers

ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics

  • Integrated Wheel–Foot–Arm Design of a Mobile Platform With Linkage Mechanisms
    on March 20, 2024 at 12:00 am

    AbstractInspired by lizards, a novel mobile platform with revolving linkage legs is proposed. The platform consists of four six-bar bipedal modules, and it is designed for heavy transportation on unstructured terrain. The platform possesses smooth-wheeled locomotion and obstacle-adaptive legged locomotion to enhance maneuverability. The kinematics of the six-bar bipedal modules is analyzed using the vector loop method, subsequently ascertaining the drive scheme. The foot trajectory compensation curve is generated using the fixed-axis rotation contour algorithm, which effectively reduces the centroid fluctuation and enables seamless switching between wheels and legs. When encountering obstacles, the revolving linkage legs act as climbing arms, facilitating seamless integration of wheel, foot, and arm. A physical prototype is developed to test the platform on three typical terrains: flat terrain, slope, and vertical obstacle. The experimental results demonstrated the feasibility of the platform structure. The platform can climb obstacles higher than its own height without adding extra actuation.

A Rigid Morphing Mechanism Enabled Earthworm-Like Crawling Robot

Abstract

Inspired by natural earthworms’ locomotion mechanism, this paper investigates how the earthworm’s muscle works and presents the approach to mimic segmental muscle by employing rigid elements-based morphing structures. Specifically, the proposed earthworm-like robot employs a class of 2D rigid elements and their array to achieve programable bidirectional 3D deformation, making the formed mechanism precisely controllable and work effectively, thus facilitating the robot’s peristaltic locomotion more efficient. To comprehensively investigate the morphing structure and its formed earthworm-like robot, the kinematics, mechanics, deformation-dependent locomotion framework with its adapted model, as well as the factors that affect the optimal velocity are developed and presented. Extensive simulations and experiments on the proposed robot are performed. The results verify the effectiveness of the morphing mechanism and it enabled earthworm-like robot and the consistency between the proposed locomotion model and the practical tests. The results also prove that regardless of the condition of the contact surface, the optimal phase shift angle can be achieved when each segment approximately contracts and relaxes once in one wavelength period. Our developed prototype achieves a speed of multiple body lengths per minute, which is very competitive compared with most developed earthworm-like robots.

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