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Noriaki Mizukami, Masanori Aragane, and Mami Nishida
In planetary exploration mission, an exploration robot has to travel on unknown and uneven, soft ground. Thus, a locomotion mechanism is an important, and the locomotion systems are discussed three types such as wheel, crawler and legs. The leg type has advantages of adaptability and an effective locomotion for terrains. Because a walking robot is able to avoid rocks and depressed areas. However, the biped robot is structurally complex and fall down easily. In this research, we developed the biped robot that is made of a soft balloon body fulfilled by helium. Since the body of the robot is always floating by helium balloon, the robot cannot fall down while walking. The leg structure for walking is made of an artificial muscle actuator. When the control command applies to the actuators, the legs swing up lightly. When the control command stops applying, the legs swing down slowly. The robot is able to move forward when the legs swing up and down repeat alternately. We have achieved the walking movement by a manual ON-OFF control of actuators on firm grounds. The purpose of this research is to clarify the interaction between the leg mechanism and soft soil. In this paper, we performed walking experiments on soft soil to estimate states of walking movements on flat soft soil using original flat shape of foots. It was confirmed that the foots did not sink and slip and the robot moved forward. Furthermore, we propose a new type of foot parts that is able to travel on uneven, soft or slope grounds, and perform experiments for verifying effectiveness.
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