Design of a wheel-propeller-leg integrated amphibious robot

The operation capabilities of robot in the amphibious environments (such as shallow water fields, surf zones, and beaches) are critical for military and civilian. In this paper, we introduce a novel amphibious robot with wheel-propeller-leg integrated driving devices, developed by Shenyang Institute of Automation, which can realize both crawling locomotion on the ground and swimming locomotion in the water without changing its driving devices. This paper describes the design of the overall robot structure, the design of the novel driving devices, and the design of the embedded control system, respectively. All the driving devices of the robot are driven by independent motor, thus the amphibious robot can conveniently switch its locomotion modes according to the operational environments. The embedded control system is a distributed control system based on CAN bus, which makes it is easy to expend sensors and devices for the robot in the future. Finally, the hydrodynamic performances of the wheel-propeller device are analyzed by using CFX hydrodynamic calculation software, and some primary experiments have been done for verifying the fundamental locomotion functions of the robot.