Design of a Bio-inspired Water-ground-air Amphibious and Cross Domain Robot Platform

Abstract

The paper presents the research progress on the a water-land amphibious and aerial unmanned operation robot platform which could swimming in the water, running on the ground and flying in the air. The design of bio-inspired wheel-paddle and wing-body-rotors inspired by Swan enable different operation modes in water, land and air environment. The advantage of wheel-paddle mechanism is to help to swim in the water and run on the ground inside of buildings with single mechanical structure. Another advantage of adopting wing-body-rotors in study is that it will inspire several working modes including hover, taking off and landing vertically in narrow lane-ways between urban buildings like rotor UAV, also high speed cruise like fix-wing airplane over the buildings. What's more, compared with air-ground amphibious robot platform with rotors and chassis structure, the outstanding advantages are higher load ratio, lower power ratio and better endurance in high speed cruise mode. In this paper, we start to study the system design, function design, structure design and operation mode in different environment. In addition, working performance of every mode is compared and analyzed.