Development of a Modular Crawler for Tracked Robots

Abstract

This paper presents the design and experiments for a novel crawler module, in which a planetary gear reducer is employed as the transmission device and provides two outputs in different forms with only one actuator. This underactuated crawler can absorb impact energy that might be transmitted to the actuator when it moves in a rough environment. To enable the use of this crawler more widely in robot systems, a modular design for the crawler is, thus, proposed and its mechanical model is developed. Experiments demonstrate that a single-crawler module can effectively perform the proposed three locomotion modes.