Development of mobile system using leg‐type crawler for rough terrain

The purpose of this study is to develop a new mobile system using “leg‐type crawler” mechanism. Our proposed “leg‐type crawler” mechanism realizes flexible mobility on rough terrain environments. The mobile system, which consists of four leg‐type crawler units including mechanisms and controller, can adopt several moving configurations. Since we adopt unimodular structure for the leg‐type crawlers, we can replace the legs easily. This paper shows the outline of the proposed leg‐type crawler units, as well as basic experimental results, proposal of basic control law for this system and verification by experiment.