“Universal Unipods” — A new autonomous decentralized multi-pedal robot system

One advantage of pedal robot is its availability in uneven terrain such as steps, messy room, disaster area, mountain or outer planet. On the other hand, pedal robot tends to be less stable and more complex in its mechanism or algorithm than wheel robot does. In this paper, the authors propose a novel pedal robot system that overcomes both stability and complexity. The system is named as ldquoUniversal Unipods,rdquo which consists of a lot of unipod robots to be attached on a single load as a body. A unipod robot has very simple underactuated mechanism and it doesnpsilat communicate each another unlike many other multi-agent robot systems. Then, basic validity and potential availability are verified by computer simulations.