A New Mechatronic Component for Adjusting the Footprint of Tracked Rescue Robots

摘要

There is no ideal footprint for a rescue robot. In some situations, for example when climbing up a rubble pile or stairs, the footprint has to be large to maximize traction and to prevent tilting over. In other situations, for example when negotiating narrow passages or doorways, the footprint has to be small to prevent to get stuck. The common approach is to use flippers, I.e., additional support tracks that can change their posture relative to the main locomotion tracks. Here a novel mechatronic design for flippers is presented that overcomes a significant drawback in the state of the art approaches, namely the large forces in the joint between main locomotion tracks and flippers. Instead of directly driving this joint to change the posture, a link mechanism driven by a ballscrew is used. In this paper, a formal analysis of the new mechanism is presented including a comparison to the state of the art. Furthermore, a concrete implementation and results from practical experiments that support the formal analysis are presented.