Wheeled locomotion for payload carrying with modular robot

Abstract

Carrying heavy payloads is a challenging task for the modular robot, because its composing modules are relatively tiny and less strong compared with conventional robots. To accomplish this task, we attached passive rollers to the modular robot, and designed a wheeled locomotion gait called tricycleBot. The gait is inspired by paddling motion, and is implemented on the modular robot called SuperBot. Features of this gait are systematically studied and verified through extensive experiments. It is shown that tricycleBot can carry payloads at least 530% of its own weight. It can also be steered remotely to move forward/backward, turn left/right. Capability of tricycleBot demonstrates that the versatility of modular robot can be further expanded to solve very specialized and challenging tasks by using heterogeneous devices.