Legged-wheeled small robot capable of terrain-adaptive locomotion via a soft actuator

The small-scale robot using soft materials features extraordinary compliance and a large amount of degree of freedoms, but its nonlinearity in material increases the system complexity for control strategy. In this paper, as inspired by the skiing-sport, a lightweight locomotion robot with a rigid poking pole is designed and driven by an artificial muscle, a conical dielectric elastomer actuator (DEA). The poking mechanism transmits the stroke of DEA into robot motion, contributing the material compliance to the capability of terrain adaptivity in the robot. The combination of a soft actuator and a rigid transmission mechanism lowers the complexity in the robotic kinetics and increases the loading capability for device carrying. Experiments verify the locomotion on the dimple and wavy pavement as well as clambering a slope. This robot offers performances including: (i) a maximum speed of 64.1mm(0.43 body length) per second; (ii) a loading capability of 7.7 times of its weight; (iii) a steering angle of 25° at a radius of 18 cm.