Abstract
Various devices, such as research robot or rescue robots, have been developed to reach locations where people cannot reach and to survey the conditions at those locations. Such devices need to have a high performance of over rough terrain, including high-speed movement and simple mechanics. They also need be easily controllable. In the past, researches focused on improving performance of over rough terrain at the expense of other features. In this paper, blade-type crawler belt mechanism performs over rough terrain without compromising the speed and controls. During the movement, the blades open outward, and the wheel diameter is effectively increased resulting in a higher performance. Furthermore, because the only modification is the addition of blades, the crawler belts move at a speed similar to ordinary crawler belts and require no additional changes. The proposed vehicle is tested and demonstrated its effectiveness through a laboratory experiment and field experiments.
