Latest Papers

ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics

  • A Small-Scale Integrated Jumping-Crawling Robot: Design, Modeling, and Demonstration
    on June 16, 2025 at 12:00 am

    AbstractThe small jumping-crawling robot improves its obstacle-crossing ability by selecting appropriate locomotion methods. However, current research on jumping-crawling robots remains focused on enhancing specific aspects of performance, and several issues still exist, including nonadjustable gaits, poor stability, nonadjustable jumping posture, and poor motion continuity. This article presents a small jumping-crawling robot with decoupled jumping and crawling mechanisms, offline adjustable gaits, autonomous self-righting, autonomous steering, and certain slope-climbing abilities. The crawling mechanism adopts a partially adjustable Klann six-bar linkage, which can generate four stride lengths and three gaits. The jumping mechanism is designed as a six-bar linkage with passive compliance, and an active clutch allows energy storage and release in any state. The autonomous self-righting mechanism enables the robot to self-right after tipping over, meanwhile providing support, steering, and posture adjustment functions. Prototype experiments show that the designed robot demonstrates good motion stability and can climb a 45 deg slope without tipping over. The robot shows excellent steering performance, with a single action taking 5 s and achieving a steering angle of 11.5 deg. It also exhibits good motion continuity, with an average recovery time of 12 s to return to crawling mode after a jump. Crawling experiments on rough terrain demonstrate the feasibility of applying the designed robot in real-world scenarios.

A Reconfigurable 6 R Linkage With Six Motion Modes and Three Topological Structures

Abstract

In this paper, a new reconfigurable 6R linkage is obtained by combining two identical equilateral Bennett linkages arranged in a plane-symmetric manner, and a detailed kinematic analysis is conducted which shows that there are six distinct motion modes and three topological structures of the derived mechanism without changing the types of kinematic joints. Explicit relationships among the kinematic variables are obtained with D–H method and various modes are discussed in detail. Bifurcation points are derived and the reconfigurations are analyzed. The result shows that the mechanism has six motion modes which contain a special case of a plane-symmetric 6R mode and a special case of a two-fold symmetric 6R mode, an X-shaped motion mode, and two V-shaped motion modes. A physical prototype is fabricated to verify the derivation and it shows that the mechanism can transform among all the motion modes without the need of reassembling.

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