Controllable Postures of a Dual-crawler-driven Robot

This paper presents a tracked robot composed of the proposed crawler mechanism, in which a planetary gear reducer is employed as transmission device and provides two outputs in different forms with only one actuator. The robot that contains two crawler modules can generate several configurations through controlling cooperatively the two actuators. This tracked robot, which uses two actuators to give four outputs, however could have less realizable postures than that where each output is provided by one actuator exactly. To figure out what postures can be generated by the introduced dual-crawler robot, the quasi-static analysis of the robot has been conducted in case of taking the rolling resistance into consideration, and its realizable postures are obtained numerically. The posture transition of the robot is also discussed in this paper.