• 대한기계학회논문집A
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• 제33권6호
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• pp.545-551
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• 2009

A small guard robot working indoors or outdoors can be used to report various information on its environment to an operator. The guard robot should be small-sized and lightweight to increase its portability. In addition, it should be able to overcome a relatively high obstacle to cope with various situations. To satisfy these requirements, this paper presents a small robot equipped with a novel hybrid wheel and track mechanism that can select wheels or tracks depending on the situation. The robot folds the tracks into the body in the wheel mode and only wheels are active with the tracks immobilized, which results in the fast moving speed. In the track mode, the tracks are extended to keep in contact with the ground. Furthermore, this research proposes the belt length maintenance mechanism by which the belt length is kept constant in either the wheel or track mode. Various experiments demonstrate that the proposed robot can move fast by using wheels on the smooth terrain and overcome obstacles by using tracks on the rough terrain.

• 한국정밀공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국정밀공학회 2007년도 추계학술대회 논문집
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• pp.285-286
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• 2007

• 로봇학회논문지
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• 제5권3호
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• pp.270-277
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• 2010

Various robot platforms have been designed and developed to perform given tasks in a hazardous environment for the purpose of surveillance, reconnaissance, search and rescue, and etc. We have considered a terrain adaptive hybrid robot platform which is equipped with rapid navigation on flat floors and good performance on overcoming stairs or obstacles. Since our special consideration is posed to its flexibility for real application, we devised a design of a transformable robot structure which consists of an ordinary wheeled structure to navigate fast on flat floor and a variable tracked structure to climb stairs effectively. Especially, track arms installed in front side, rear side, and mid side are used for navigation mode transition between flatland navigation and stairs climbing. The mode transition is determined and implemented by adaptive driving mode control of mobile robot. The wheel and track hybrid mobile platform apparatus applied off-road driving mechanism for various professional service robots is verified through experiments for navigation performance in real and test-bed environment.