The design of a mother robot for marsupial robotic system

A mother or transporting robot is designed in this paper, which is dedicated to retrieve, transport and deploy the children or smaller robots to configure a robotic team called the marsupial robotic system. In order to manage children robots flexibly, a multi-floor docking station is mounted on the mother robot with a lifting platform which is dragged via lead-screw driving. Touch switches are utilized to initialize the lifting height and identify whether a child robot arrives at the parking position. Also, a dock camera is set on the top of the station to recognize different children robots for the purpose of deploying or retrieving. The locomotion ability is enhanced by combining the advantages of the wheeled-mobile platform and tracked-mobile platform with the concept of wheel-track combo, which barely increases the complexity of mechanism. Finally, a prototype of mother robot is developed and implemented.