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Design and locomotion analysis of an arm-wheel-track multimodal mobile robot

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Abstract

The increasingly complex application environment has raised higher demands on the performance of ground mobile robots in terms of environmental adaptability, autonomous avoidance, and self-rescue. In addition to multi-sensor fusion and control strategies, novel locomotion systems are crucial research directions. Here we propose a novel hybrid locomotion ground mobile robot, called arm-wheel-track robot (AWTR). It combines two locomotion systems, wheeled and tracked locomotion. Two multiple-degree-of-freedom arms are mounted on the front and rear of its chassis. The arms can assist the robot in transforming locomotion modes, surmounting obstacles, fall recovery, etc. Two ultrasonic sensors and a tilt sensor are mounted on it to perceive the environment and self-posture. One of the ultrasonic sensors mounted on the forearm can achieve a more comprehensive perception of the environment ahead with the extra workspace provided by the forearm. We establish the relationship of terrains with sensor data and forearm posture and develop different locomotion strategies for different terrains, so that the robot can classify different terrain and accomplish the corresponding locomotion strategies autonomously. We have built a prototype and conducted experiments on different terrains. The results verified the robot’s movement performance, the effectiveness of the terrain perception method and the locomotion strategies for different terrains.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Y. Guo and X. Yang for their help in the experiments and video production. The authors would also like to thank Y. Feng and H. Su for their suggestions in the design.

Funding

Research was supported by the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 3222016); the National Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 62103035); the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 2020JBM265); the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2021M690337); and the Beijing Laboratory for Urban Mass Transit (Grant No. 353203535).

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Author notes

  1. Tianmiao Wang, Jiahao Chen, Xuan Pei and Tao Tang have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, 100044, China

    Hao Wang, Jiahao Chen, Xuan Pei & Taogang Hou

  2. School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Hao Wang & Tianmiao Wang

  3. State Key Laboratory of Rail Traffic Control and Safety, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, 100044, China

    Tao Tang

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  1. Hao Wang
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Contributions

HW and TH conceived the robot architecture and the locomotion system; TW and TT supervised the scientific methodology for the functional design and the control strategies; HW, JC, XP, and TH completed prototyping, algorithm testing, and experiments; all authors have prepared the manuscript. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Taogang Hou.

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Supplementary file 1 (mp4 131017 KB)

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Wang, H., Wang, T., Chen, J. et al. Design and locomotion analysis of an arm-wheel-track multimodal mobile robot. Intel Serv Robotics 16, 485–495 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-023-00472-8

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