Design and Fabrication of Octopod for Survey and Rescue Operation

Abstract

Although wheel is an ideal method of locomotion and the invention of the spoke wheel made a wheel lighter and swifter, a wheel cannot function well on slanted or rough surfaces. Further, the load support of the wheel is limited to a point of the whole wheel in contact with the ground. In rough and rocky terrains, wheels become ineffective or not able to serve the purpose. On realizing this fact, a new design and fabrication is suggested and a walking robot is designed accordingly. In the practical life, the usage of robots has been felt especially in search and rescue operations, extraterrestrial exploration and many more such applications. In these areas, the existing wheeled robots are not able to perform well and hence they can be replaced with walking robots of special design. In distant areas, many expeditions of walking robot need the tele-operation mode. Yet, sensing the terrains and controlling the robots become difficult for a human operator with the available capabilities and hence the walking robot should be designed in such a way that even with limited feedback from the remote operator, it should have adequate autonomy to take due advantage of its competency and capabilities. The paper envisages a new method of real-time motion planning on rough and rugged surface and in this paper, an octopod is designed, developed and fabricated accordingly.

A Dynamic Pole Motion Approach for Control of Nonlinear Hybrid Soft Legs: A Preliminary Study

“…Although wheeled robots have been used in various engineering applications due to easy and simple steering operation, they face challenges on rugged and uneven terrains [1]. Legged terrestrial mobile robots are more versatile in the locomotory performance, and recently various bioinspired legged robots from animals and insects have been studied and developed in the form of two-legged (bipedal) [2,3], four-legged (quadrupedal) [4,5], sixlegged (hexapedal) [6,7], and eight-legged (octopedal) [8,9] robots. It has been investigated that more legs on a robot yield superior stability to less legs on a robot during locomotion.…”