The purpose of this study is to develop a robotic platform which can be used in many dangerous or inconvenient tasks such as search and rescue operations, space exploration, hazardous material cleanup or as a simple service robot capable of navigating through houses and cities. In order to reduce the cost and development time of an all-terrain autonomous robot, a modular approach is used. The robot is designed as simple as possible by using one-degree-of-freedom modules that will allow the platform to reconfigure itself to use two different locomotion methods inspired by biological systems: Quadruped and caterpillar locomotion. This paper describes the development of modules that form the reconfigurable robot, and then focuses on the gait definitions of the crawling and quadruped modes of locomotion. A prototype of this robot has been built and the described gaits are tested at FIU’s Robotics & Automation Laboratory. Test results are also presented in this work.
Robotic Platform for Automated Search and Rescue Missions of Humans
