Research and Development of a Small Wheel-Pedrail Patrol Robot in Forest

A small robot of combining wheel with pedrail forth rugged forest terrain is researched and developed in this paper. The robot consists of a walking mechanism, an elevating mechanism, a navigation positioning module, a wireless communication module, and some peripheral sensors. The principles of the light weight and the modularity are adopted to realize the high traffic ability and quick assembly. The test shows that the robot has high traffic ability and it can crossover the vertical obstacle of 100 mm height or the horizontal ditch of 300 mm width, and the maximum running speed is 1m/s. Furthermore, the environmental information including the temperature, the humidity, the wind speed, the surroundings, and the real position can be transmitted to an upper computer by the wireless communication for operator to judge and make decision, which can highly improve the efficiency of the forest fire prevention and the forestry resource protection.