VLR: Cockroach millirobot with load decoupling structure

This paper presents the development of Very Large RoACH (VLR), which is a rapidly-prototyped folded cardboard cockroach-like robot for carrying relatively heavy loads. To increase load capacity, a vertically movable platform is designed, which can decouple an internal payload from loading the robot hips. Based on the previous VelociRoACH design, VLR is designed for greater load capacity, by 160% size scaling. After building a prototype, experiments are performed. The speed and traction force are measured to validate the performance of the proposed robot. Through these experiments, it was found that the speed of the robot increases by 2.2 times and the traction force increases by 1.4 times using the proposed mechanism compared to the design without load decoupling.