TurboQuad: A leg-wheel transformable robot using bio-inspired control

Wei-Hsi Chen, Hung-Sheng Lin, Pei-Chun Lin

Abstract: The ability of the robot to negotiate the terrain strongly depends on its morphology and control strategy. Wheeled morphology is extremely good on the flat terrain, and the legged morphology has great mobility on the rough terrain, as proved by the legged animals. Thus, as the terrain nowadays is highly mixed with natural rough terrain, artificial rough terrain (ex: stair, bumps, etc), and artificial flat terrain (ex: road), designing a good robotic platform which can operated on all three categories may be a good solution. In the last few decades researchers have come up with two different approaches to elevate robots' adaption to the environment: one is to design special mechanisms to overcome uneven terrain, and the other is to focus on behavioral development of a given robot to adapt different situations. Both approaches exist, but only a few works tried to solve the problem from both aspects simultaneously.