A Compact Wheeled Robot that Can Jump while Rolling

Abstract

In this paper, we study a compact wheeled robot that can jump while rolling. Some robots are capable of jumping or rolling, but as far as we know, those robots are not focused on jumping while rolling. We know that animals jump while running to escape from predators. Robots can move quickly by jumping while rolling. We consider a model of a robot jumping while rolling and evaluate the proposed robot. The proposed robot has two wheels and a jumping mechanism based on snap-through buckling of an elastic strip. The proposed robot can jump about 5.9 cm high and 22 cm wide on average while maintaining a traveling speed of about 1.2 m/s. The proposed robot can change the jumping angle without greatly decreasing the impulse for the moving speed.