EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON THE FLEXIBLE STRAIGHT LEG FOR MOBILE ROBOTS

There are lots of demands for the amphibious travelling style of mobile robots. This paper proposed a simple, elastic and useful leg for mobile robots. When moving on the ground, the leg could be deformed a curve-like one passively, forced by the ground reaction force. Moreover, the leg would recover straight, fin-like, and propel the robot in the water. The leg just needed to be fixed on the output shaft simply and its deformation could be realized without any additional mechanism. That made it could be widely applied to much more robots. To evaluate the movement performance of the leg, an experiment platform was designed and series of experiments were carried out. The results verified our assumption that the elastic leg would be useful for robot’s travelling. The data obtained in the experiments would also help optimize this leg in the future.