Abstract
This paper discusses shapes and mechanisms of mobile robots required to travel a reed region. Recently field surveys in wetland are carried out for the wetland safeguard and the restoration projects. It is difficult to walk around inside the wetlands because of a thick growth of plants or deep mud. Therefore there is a requirement for equipments to supports the field survey activities. In this research we focused at the development of the equipment to travel at reed regions which occupied the majority of the wetlands. At first preliminary experiments at a neighbor test field was performed. To evaluate the mechanical properties of the reeds quantitatively, a reed was modeled as a cantilever beams which have fixed support of ground, and its large deflection was analyzed. Finally we discussed the results calculated with several parameters, such as sinkage and resistance, and considered required aspects for a robot design.
