Design and Implementation of a Leg–Wheel Robot: Transleg

Abstract

In this paper, the design and implementation of a novel leg–wheel robot called Transleg are presented. Transleg adopts the wire as the transmission mechanism to simplify the structure and reduce the weight. To the best knowledge of the authors, the wire-driven method has never been used in the leg–wheel robots, so it makes Transleg distinguished from the existing leg–wheel robots. Transleg possesses four transformable leg–wheel mechanisms, each of which has two active degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) in the legged mode and one in the wheeled mode. Two actuators driving each leg–wheel mechanism are mounted on the body, so the weight of the leg–wheel mechanism is reduced as far as possible, which contributes to improving the stability of the legged locomotion. Inspired by the quadruped mammals, a compliant spine mechanism is designed for Transleg. The spine mechanism is also actuated by two actuators to bend in the yaw and pitch directions. It will be beneficial to the turning motion in the legged and wheeled modes and the bounding gait in the legged mode. The design and kinematic analyses of the leg–wheel and spine mechanisms are presented in detail. To verify the feasibility of Transleg, a prototype is implemented. The experiments on the motions in the legged and wheeled modes, the switch between the two modes, and the spine motions are conducted. The experimental results demonstrate the validity of Transleg.