Design and basic experiments of a transformable wheel-track robot with self-adaptive mobile mechanism

The mobile robots often perform the dangerous missions such as planetary exploration, reconnaissance, anti-terrorism, rescue, and so on. So it is required that the robots should be able to move in the complex and unpredictable environment where the ground might be soft and hard, even and uneven. To access to such terrains, a novel robot (NEZA-I) with the self-adaptive mobile mechanism is proposed and developed. It consists of a control system unit and two symmetric transformable wheel-track (TWT) units. Each TWT unit is driven only by one servo motor, and can efficiently move over rough terrain by changing the locomotion mode and transforming the track configuration. It means that the mobile mechanism of NEZA-I has self-adaptability to the irregular environment. The paper proposes the design concept of NEZA-I, presents the structure and the drive system of NEZA-I, and describes the self-adaptive principle of the mobile mechanism to the rough terrains. The locomotion mode and posture of the mobile mechanism is analyzed by the means of simulation. Finally, basic experiments verify the mobility of NEZA-I.