Impact absorption of a dual-crawler-driven robot

This paper introduces a tracked robot that consists of the proposed crawler module, in which a planetary gear reducer is adopted as the power transmission device to give two different outputs with just one actuator. Compared with each module driven by two actuators, the module driven by just one actuator could perform a good impact absorption when a collision occurs with environment due to the fact that an output redundancy exists inside. To figure out what the advantage of our mechanism to the impact absorption is, impact analysis from the external components of the robot to its internal transmission parts is conducted and the results of impact effect to actuators in our mechanism are correspondingly derived in comparison with that in the conventional mechanism where each output is provided by one actuator.