Abstract
In this study, we develop a small amphibious robot. For rescue operation in disaster area, it is required to rapidly move and investigate not only narrow space on the ground but also flooded spot on the water. Although many on-the-water robots are developed, the posture stabilization mechanism depends on the tail buoyancy. However, such tail increases the body size and also constrains the agility which a cm-scale robot has essentially. In this paper, we propose the tailless quadruped robot that can move the legs three-dimensionally to stabilize the posture. Here we analyzed the lift, thrust, and moment generated by the leg motion using numerical simulator and developed the hardware with the length of 9 cm and the mass of 10 g. The result showed that the robot ran on the water at the speed of 5 body lengths per second (50 cm/s).
