- 2949 - The Mobility Performances of New Wheeled and Legged Hybrid Mechanisms System Robot iSRo Son Kuswadi 1 , Indra Adji Sulistijono 1 , Rachman Ardyansyah 1 , Ahmad Zulkarnain 1 , Tiyo Avianto 1 , Ilmi Rizki Imaduddin 1 , Achmad Luthfi 1 , Moh. Saifulloh 1 , Achmad Jazidie 2 , and Mitsuji Sampei 3 1 Dept. of Mechatronics Engineering, Electronics Engineering Polytechnic Institute of Surabaya (EEPIS) 2 Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember Surabaya (ITS) Kampus ITS, Jalan Raya ITS Sukolilo, Surabaya 60111, Indonesia; E-mail: {sonk, indra}@eepis-its.edu 3 Dept. of Mechanical and Control System Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology 2-12-1 O-okayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8550, Japan; E-mail: sampei@ctrl.titech.ac.jp Abstract: In rescue robot competition field, a robot needs to operate in various dynamic environments where they encounter a multitude of unknown both static and/or moving obstacles and targets. Hence, the robot should have high mobility performance to cope with this situation. Here, we propose a new robot hybrid mechanism that consists of wheeled and legged actuators. Based upon the designed mechanism, we derive 10 primitive motions. It is apparent that with this large number of primitive motions, the robot could achieve high mobility performances. We show such high performance by simulation and experiment. Keywords: Hybrid mechanisms, parallel robot, rescue robot, mobility 1. INTRODUCTION Robotics is an exciting field in engineering and nat- ural sciences. Robotics has already made a significant contribution to many industries with the widespread use of industrial robots for tasks such as assembly, welding, painting, and handling materials. In parallel, we have witnessed the emergence of special robots, which can un- dertake assistive jobs, such as search and rescue [1], de- mining [2], surveillance [3], exploration [4], and security [5] functions. Indeed, the interest in mobile machines, such as climbing and walking robots [6], has broadened the scope of investigation in robotics. In dynamic field like rescue robot competition arena, the robot should have capability to do maneuver in un- predictable and complicated area. Therefore, it needs a robot with very flexible mechanism and a proper con- trol algorithm. By flexible mechanism, the robot should have enough degree of freedom and rich of kind of ac- tuator to cope with different situation in the field. The researchers introduce many kind of robot to be work in the field, mostly wheeled [7] and legged [8] mechanism. However, recently many of them propose new ideas about new systems of movement of robot that take ideas from nature called as biologically-inspired robot [9]. The ideas from biology and self-organization can strongly benefit the design of autonomous robot. Artifacts in general and robots in particular are always designed for a particular task environment in which they have to achieve certain behaviors. In manufacturing, for example, the robot that should rapidly weld pieces to- gether, the focus is on speed, precision, controllability and cost effectiveness. In other hand, when robots will be utilized in the real world, should have capability to cope with uncertain situations and react quickly to changes in the environment. Hence, the biological systems become naturally most important inspiration resources for robot engineers to design a robot. Through simulation, steer- ing is possible, even though the leg actuation is limited to motion in the sagittal plane only, via differential motion between left and right legs. Also interesting to note a quadruped robot TITAN (Tokyo Institute of Technology Aruku Norimono) as a series of Hiroses work [11]. The robot is equipped with adaptive feet, enabling it to walk on uneven terrain; it also has the ability to recover from falls and can climb stairs autonomously. One of the most interesting features of this robot is that it can stand on three legs and use the fourth leg, equipped with an adjustable gripper, as a ma- nipulator. Snake robots also become interesting research topics among robot engineers [12]. The undulating move- ment of a snake requires coordination and sequencing of muscle contractions along the spinal cord, enabling the successive segments of the animal to move in turn. Therefore, on making snake robot requires the construc- tion of a multi-segmented body with the appropriate con- trol sequence to allow smooth, undulating movements [13],[14]. In this work, we propose a new hybrid mechanism of wheeled and legged, called iSRo (intelligent Search Robot). The robot will be utilized as a SAR (search-and- rescue) robot that inspired from biological systems as fol- lows. First, we got an idea from the human shoulder. Then we realize the similar mechanism of the shoulder and to increase the mobility we add wheeled actuators. It will be shown that the robot has 10 primitive motions, and hence it will have very flexible mobility by combin- ing those primitive motions. This paper is organized as follows. Section II proposes the robot mechanism and mobility of the robot. Section III shows some experimental results. Section IV con- cludes this paper and describes the future works. ICROS-SICE International Joint Conference 2009 August 18-21, 2009, Fukuoka International Congress Center, Japan PR0002/09/0000-2949 ¥400 © 2009 SICE