Self-Adaptive Obstacle Crossing of an AntiBot From Reconfiguration Control and Mechanical Adaptation

One drawback of wheeled robots is their inferiority to conquer large obstacles and perform well on complicated terrains, which limits their application in rescue missions. To provide a solution to this issue, an ant-like six-wheeled reconfigurable robot, called AntiBot, is proposed in this paper. The AntiBot has a Sarrus reconfiguration body, a three-rocker-leg passive suspension, and mechanical adaptable obstacle-climbing wheeled legs. In this paper, we demonstrate through simulations and experiments that this robot can change the position of its center of mass actively to improve its obstacle-crossing capability. The geometric and static stability conditions for obstacle crossing of the robot are derived and formulated, and numerical simulations are conducted to find the feasible region of the robot's configuration in obstacle crossing. In addition, a self-adaptive obstacle-crossing algorithm is proposed to improve the robot's obstacle-crossing performance. A physical prototype is developed, and using it, a series of experiments are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed self-adaptive obstacle-crossing algorithm.