Design and Development of Dual Environment Locomotion Mechanism for Mobile Robot

Abstract

The robotics is a branch of engineering and science which deals with the design, construction and control the robot. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist human. There are various types of robots available for required application. Mobile robots have additional advantage in the robotics because of their capability to move from one place to another. This mobile capability is the result of the locomotion mechanism incorporated in the robots. Different locomotion mechanisms are available for the Terrestrial, Aquatic and Ariel environment. Current locomotion mechanisms are designed for one specific environment and so the robots are bounded to deal with that specific environment only. This limitation can be overcome by developing a new type of locomotion mechanism which can handle more than one environment. Present project is targeting the design and development of a locomotion mechanism for dual environment. Terrestrial and Aquatic environments are considered for locomotion mechanism which defines the robot amphibious. Soft robotics in form of soft actuator, is incorporated in the approach to make the design bio inspired in nature. Suitable geometrical shape for soft actuator is selected after the trend analysis of deformation of various samples. Various samples of soft actuators are developed to study the effect of shore hardness and geometrical profile. Experimental analysis is conducted to observe the deformation of the developed soft actuators. Finally, the soft actuators are placed in the locomotion wheel to study the behavior under the expansion when air pressure is applied and contraction under natural pressure release.