A portable off‐road crawling hexapod robot

Abstract

Abstract Legged robot has attracted wide attention because of its outstanding mobility and flexibility in the off‐road environment. Benefitting from the smooth foot trajectory and the discrete footholds, the robot can traverse the rough terrains with a great maneuverability. This paper studies a portable off‐road crawling hexapod robot with a flat structure of Schatz linkage. The proposed crawling hexapod robot could be stacked flatly with a compact size, which is good for storage and transportation. What's more, the robot could play an important role in the search and rescue mission. It could protect the operator from an incident like a collapsing wall. The robot has four locomotion gaits to meet different demands on rough terrains, including the hexapod gait, the tripod gait, the butterfly stroke gait, and the escape gait. A prototype of the robot system is fabricated. A series of experiments and simulated search and rescue missions are conducted, and the results verify that the robot could traverse through the rough terrain and complete the tasks required in the search and rescue mission.