Controllable postures of a dual-crawler-driven robot

This paper presents a tracked robot equipped with the proposed crawler mechanism, in which a planetary gear reducer is employed as a transmission device and provides two outputs in different forms with only one actuator. A robot which contains two crawler modules can generate several configurations through cooperatively controlling 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, quasi-static analysis of the robot has been conducted while taking the rolling resistance into consideration and its realizable postures have been obtained numerically. The posture transition of the robot is also discussed in this paper. Experiments are conducted to verify the quasi-static analysis for each configuration.