Experimental study on the movement performance of elastic legs in the sand

Attracted by the fact that there are lots of demands for robots working in the amphibious environment, this paper proposes a novel, simple and efficient leg for amphibious robots. That leg is made of the elastic material. The leg could deform a curve-like one passively, forced by the resistance when moving on the ground. Moreover, the leg would recover straight, fin-like, promoting the robots swimming in the water. The deformation of the leg is realized passively without any auxiliary structure. In addition, with the characteristic of elasticity, the elastic leg may help the robot improve the movement performance. In this paper, an experiment platform is designed for the locomotion performance of the elastic legs in the sand terrain. With that platform, the movement parameters of the elastic legs could be obtained and analyzed. A series of experiments were performed. The results verify our assumption, which is meaningful for the robot moving though the amphibious environment. Besides, robot with those legs could also simplify its motion module and reduce the weight for more working load.