Abstract
Wheels and crawlers are commonly used in existing mobile robots. However, a robot with wheels or crawlers cannot be easily sealed against water and dust. In this paper, a new propulsion mechanism named "Surface Wave Mechanism" is proposed. It can generate propulsive motion by small scale rotating motion on the propelling surface. The main feature of this mechanism is the simple structure and it can be entirely covered by rubber sheet and becomes water-proof. Surface Wave Mechanism would have a wide range of application in the future such as inspection robots or rescue robots. Both planer and circular prototypes of this mechanism were designed and the performance was evaluated by experiments.
