Design and implementation of a quadruped amphibious robot using duck feet

Roaming complexity in terrains and unexpected environments pose significant difficulties in robotic exploration of an area. In a broader sense, robots have to face two common tasks during exploration, namely, walking on the drylands and swimming through the water. This research aims to design and develop an amphibious robot, which incorporates a webbed duck feet design to walk on different terrains, swim in the water, and tackle obstructions on its way. The designed robot is compact, easy to use, and also has the abilities to work autonomously. Such a mechanism is implemented by designing a novel robotic webbed foot consisting of two hinged plates. Because of the design, the webbed feet are able to open and close with the help of water pressure. Klann linkages have been used to convert rotational motion to walking and swimming for the animal's gait. Because of its amphibian nature, the designed robot can be used for exploring tight caves, closed spaces, and moving on uneven challenging terrains such as sand, mud, or water. It is envisaged that the proposed design will be appreciated in the industry to design amphibious robots in the near future. - 2019 by the authors.Faculty of Robotics and Advanced Computing, Qatar Armed Forces-Academic Bridge Program, Qatar Foundation, 24404 Doha, Qatar Faculty of Engineering, Computing and Science, Swinburne University of Technology, 93350 Sarawak, Malaysia Faculty of Computer Engineering Signal and Image Processing Qatar University, 24404 Doha, Qatar Correspondence: [email protected]

A comprehensive review of driving mechanisms in amphibian spherical robots

A spherical robot is based on the rolling concept inspired by the pangolins. This mode of locomotion is faster and safer as its spherical body becomes a protective shield. The mobility, adaptability, and concealment provided by a spherical robot can be used for terrestrial, aquatic, and amphibious applications such as harbour patrolling, defence tasks, rough terrains exploration, and agriculture. In designing the robot, priority on the centre of gravity position should be given as this will affect the robot’s stability, either while static or in motion. A proper driving principle can overcome this issue while ensuring that the robot can perform a given task. Therefore, this paper intends to identify the driving principle proposed for spherical amphibian robots by systematically reviewing existing driving methods and the mechanisms used. From the search, 159 titles were published since 2015. The review has identified that the driving mechanism of a spherical amphibian robot depends on the actuation method, which is the legged actuation, combined actuation, and linear actuation. Each driving principle has its trade-off in performing the terrestrial and underwater motion. Furthermore, the driving principle also affects the advantages of a spherical robot system. Hence, studies on the driving principle that are more agile and do not ignore the spherical robot’s main advantage need to be given emphasis

A comprehensive review of driving mechanisms in amphibian spherical robots

864-872A spherical robot is based on the rolling concept inspired by the pangolins. This mode of locomotion is faster and safer as its spherical body becomes a protective shield. The mobility, adaptability, and concealment provided by a spherical robot can be used for terrestrial, aquatic, and amphibious applications such as harbour patrolling, defence tasks, rough terrains exploration, and agriculture. In designing the robot, priority on the centre of gravity position should be given as this will affect the robot’s stability, either while static or in motion. A proper driving principle can overcome this issue while ensuring that the robot can perform a given task. Therefore, this paper intends to identify the driving principle proposed for spherical amphibian robots by systematically reviewing existing driving methods and the mechanisms used. From the search, 159 titles were published since 2015. The review has identified that the driving mechanism of a spherical amphibian robot depends on the actuation method, which is the legged actuation, combined actuation, and linear actuation. Each driving principle has its trade-off in performing the terrestrial and underwater motion. Furthermore, the driving principle also affects the advantages of a spherical robot system. Hence, studies on the driving principle that are more agile and do not ignore the spherical robot’s main advantage need to be given emphasis

Design and modelling of four-legged amphibious robot

This paper proposed a method to model the gait movement of four-legged amphibious robot. This type of robot has shown a great potential to perform complex operations in difficult and challenging land and underwater environments. Not only they can monitor and manipulate complicated environment conditions during disasters such as floods, landslides, and others, but it can also perform deep ocean exploration, underwater structures manipulation, disaster rescue operations, and reconnaissance. The promising advantages of amphibious underwater robots have motivated researchers to propose different design strategies for the structures and control methods of such vehicles. To design and model the fourlegged amphibious robot, the connection between the input links with the output links was identified in this paper. The system architecture and system prototype were developed for model performance test. The tests were conducted and analyses using the SAM- the Ultimate Mechanism Designer for various configurations of the links in terms of the angle, angular velocity and the angular acceleration

Virtual prototype-based kinematic modeling and simulation of a multi-mode amphibious robot

The amphibious robot, which has the capability of multi-mode motion, can maneuver diverse environments with high mobility and adaptability. These are employed in the area of reconnaissance, search and rescue operations, and monitoring. The existing amphibious robots have lower maneuverability over the crawling period on uneven and slope surfaces on the land. In this paper, a kinematic model of the amphibious robot based on virtual prototyping is designed for multi-mode locomotion. ADAMS (Automated dynamic analysis of mechanical systems) is a multi-body dynamic solver adopted to build the simulation model for the robot. The novel amphibious robot employs a Rockerbogie mechanism equipped with wheel paddles. The locomotion analysis on land involves straight-going and obstacle negotiation, which is simulated using ADAMS. The simulation analysis result demonstrates increased maneuverability, achieving a robot's velocity of robot 1.6 m/s. Normal forces on the front and rear wheels show equal load distribution, contributing more to the robot’s equilibrium over uneven terrain. The simulation result reflects the accurate kinematic characteristics of the amphibious robot and provides a theoretical basis for developing an algorithm for robot motion control and optimization. Further, this research will concentrate on the kinematic simulation maneuvering in water mode with the wheel paddle

Locomation strategies for amphibious robots-a review

In the past two decades, unmanned amphibious robots have proven the most promising and efficient systems ranging from scientific, military, and commercial applications. The applications like monitoring, surveillance, reconnaissance, and military combat operations require platforms to maneuver on challenging, complex, rugged terrains and diverse environments. The recent technological advancements and development in aquatic robotics and mobile robotics have facilitated a more agile, robust, and efficient amphibious robots maneuvering in multiple environments and various terrain profiles. Amphibious robot locomotion inspired by nature, such as amphibians, offers augmented flexibility, improved adaptability, and higher mobility over terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial mediums. In this review, amphibious robots' locomotion mechanism designed and developed previously are consolidated, systematically The review also analyzes the literature on amphibious robot highlighting the limitations, open research areas, recent key development in this research field. Further development and contributions to amphibious robot locomotion, actuation, and control can be utilized to perform specific missions in sophisticated environments, where tasks are unsafe or hardly feasible for the divers or traditional aquatic and terrestrial robots

The Kinematics and Dynamics Motion Analysis of a Spherical Robot

Mobile robot application has reach more aspect of life in industry and domestic. One of the mobile robot types is a spherical robot whose components are shielded inside a rigid cell. The spherical robot is an interesting type of robot that combined the concept of a mobile robot and inverted pendulum for inner mechanism. This combination adds to more complex controllerdesignthantheothertypeofmobilerobots.Asidefrom these challenges, the application of a spherical robot is extensive, from being a simple toy, to become an industrial surveillance robot. This paper discusses the mathematical analysis of the kinematics and dynamics motion analysis of a spherical robot. The analysis combines mobile robot and pendulum modeling as the robot motion generated by a pendulum mechanism. This paper is expected to give a complete discussion of the kinematics and dynamics motion analysis of a spherical robot