PARAMETRIC DESIGN ANALYSIS OF HYBRID RHEX ROBOT

Abstract

In recent years, the use of unmanned autonomous wheeled, tracked or insect-legged unmanned ground vehicles has become increasingly widespread, and studies on the development of these ground vehicles are increasingly carried out by scientists and engineers. The works are generally small-sized designs and are carried out on concepts such as wheels, crawlers or insect legs. However, the small size of the designs and especially the leg shapes designed accordingly have problems in overcoming various types of obstacles, especially high surfaces. As a matter of fact, the fact that each different driving surface has different positive and negative aspects can be shown as the reason for this. For example; While robots with wheeled driving surfaces move faster on a flat road, robots with insect-legged driving surfaces can be more effective in climbing and energy saving. In recent years, robots that can both walk and make short flights have been designed in order to reduce these negative aspects of driving surfaces. In this way, robots that are more effective in overcoming obstacles or moving forward are being tried to be created. In this thesis, mathematical modeling will be presented for the insect-legged RHex robot, which can both walk and make short flights, in order to eliminate the limitations that may arise from driving surfaces. Afterwards, walking and short flight models will be transitioned between each other. The resulting general model (walking and short flight) will be tested with specified task simulations and the simulation results of the RHex robot in this field will be revealed. Task simulations were determined as first crossing a puddle and then overcoming a steep obstacle of a certain size. In this way, the behavior of the hybrid RHex robot will be seen mathematically with the information obtained as a result of the tests.