Design and Development of the Wheel-legged Robot Dog Kara

Abstract

Due to its advantages of high speed, good stability, easy control, low energy consumption and strong adaptability to complex terrain, the wheel-legged robot dog has developed rapidly in recent years. The common wheel-leg switchable robot dog has a simple structure, but it needs to be equipped with four wheels, which will not only affect the appearance and the working space of the joints near the wheels, but also result in a more complex control. Kara designed in this paper, which is a wheeled mobile robot when its thighs and shanks are closed or a quadruped robot when its thighs and shanks opened. The results of gait planning and dynamics simulation show that Kara has simple structure, easy to control and can achieve both stable wheeled movement and legged walking.

$\mathbf{\alpha }$-WaLTR: Adaptive Wheel-and-Leg Transformable Robot for Versatile Multiterrain Locomotion

“…Another strategy adopts stick-shaped legs, hidden in the wheel or extended out [30], [31]. A wheel comprised of two halfcircle legs can be either folded into a semicircular wheel [32], [33] or deviated radially, forming two legs [34], [35]. A commonly adopted three-or four-leg wheel design consists of arciform lobes connected through linkages that cause the lobes to fold or extend [36], [37], [38], [39].…”