Abstract
This paper presents a tracked robot composed of the proposed crawler mechanism, in which a planetary gear reducer is employed as the transmission device and provides two outputs in different forms with only one actuator. Modular design of the crawler mechanism has been conducted for enlarging its use in robot systems while considering waterproof and dustproof qualities. Modular statics for the crawler module has been investigated and a generic group of equations is proposed to describe all the configurations of the robot. Simulation results have been given numerically and the effects of some key parameters on the robot performance have been discussed in this paper.
