A New Self-Reconfiguration Wave-like Crawling Robot: Design, Analysis, and Experiments

Traditional mobile robots with fixed structures lack the ability to cope with complex terrains and tasks. Reconfigurable modular mobile robots have received considerable attention as they can automatically reassemble according to the changing environment or task. In this paper, a new self-reconfiguration wave-like crawling (SWC) robot is presented to improve the mobile robots’ locomotion capacity. First, the mechanical design of the wave-like crawling mechanism is detailed. Then, the series and parallel connections are introduced to achieve self-reconfiguration. In addition, the kinematic model of the SWC robot is established. Finally, experiments were performed to verify the robotic system with wireless data transmission.