多様な屋外環境での移動を可能とする全側面多脚ロボット

―乗り越え動作を改善するパンタグラフ機構による高ストロークの実現―

抄録

A legged robot that walks slippery terrains or underwater with strong water flow may suffer from being unable to move by turning over. Highly functional legs with high DOF may be able to support recovery. However, such complex legs may also suffer from easily broken down under such severe environments. To solve this problem, we have been developing a mobile legged robot that has legs at all side faces, which are synchronously driven by a single motor and keeps moving to the same direction even if it is turned over any times. Our previous design was based on a slotted crank mechanism as a leg motion generator. However, by this mechanism, the leg movement was fixed as a flat ellipse, which causes insufficiency of stroke. Thus, the robot could not step over even a small obstacles, or was easily get stuck by sinking down a soft terrain. In this research, we propose a multiple linkage drive as a leg movement generator. We use a pantograph mechanism which is driven by adjacent two input rotational links turning the same direction. Our prototype shows that a sufficiently high stroke is realized in almost the same size of the robot.