Paper Title
Autonomous Wheeling and Hopping Sphere BOT For Unknown Terrain Mission
Abstract
This paper describes the development of small rolling and hopping robots that are useful for many tasks in
unknown rugged terrain, and are especially suited to celestial exploration in small gravity environments. the family of
hopping or jumping, described here are characterized by discontinuous motion, whereby the robot stops after each jump to
regain the upright position, recharge its jumping mechanism and localize itself. We describe the evolution of our hopping
robot concept by way of prototypes that can be developed. These theoretical prototypes show that a small robot can move
effectively by hopping provided that it is equipped with steering, jumping and self-righting capabilities. This paper gives the
detailed pictures and descriptions of the mechanism of various prototypes. A hopping robot can jump over the barrier several
times higher than its own height. The combination of the hopping movement and the wheeling movement can greatly
enhance the scope of robot‘s activities. In this paper, a novel five-shank hopping mechanism was employed to build the
wheeling hopping combination scout robot. The nonlinear character of the six-shank hopping mechanism was analyzed and
then used in the proposed nonlinear spring-mass model for the robot. The rules of robot‘s movement were deduced,
influencing factors of the jumping height were analyzed and the countermeasure was adopted. Finally, a simulation analysis
and an experiment of the robot's movement were carried out. The results showed that the robot has strong locomotives and
survival ability.
Keywords— Hopping robots, spherical robots, planetary rovers, five shank mechanism, Non-linear spring Mass model,
Elasticity, Autonomous robot.