WHEELEG Legged Wheeled Robot

The robot WHEELEG has been designed and built in order to investigate the capabilities of hybrid wheeled/legged structures in rough terrain.Possible applications that have been envisaged are humanitarian demining, exploration of unstructured environments like volcanoes etc.

This robot has two pneumatically actuated front legs, each one with three degrees of freedom, and two rear wheels independently actuated by using two distinct DC motors. The main idea was to use rear wheels to carry most of the weight of the robot and front legs to improve the grip with the surface to climb and to overcome obstacles. The robot dimensions are W X L X H =66cm X 111cm X 40cm.

The WHEELEG has six ST52E301 Fuzzy microcontrollers for the control of the pistons, two DSP HCTL1100 for the control of the wheels and a PENTIUM 200MHz microprocessor for the global trajectory control and the communications with the user.

1. S. Guccione, G. Muscato, "Experimental outdoor and laboratory tests with the hybrid robot WHEELEG", Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Field and Service Robotics, Helsinki (Finland) June 11-13, 2001

2. S. Guccione, G. Muscato, "Test of the hybrid robot WHEELEG on a Volcanic Environment", Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics, Como, Italy July 2001, p.3.

3. S. Guccione, G. Muscato, "Control Strategies Computing architectures and Experimental Results of the Hybrid Robot Wheeleg", IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, (IEEE Piscataway, U.S.A.), December 2003.

4. M. Lacagnina, G. Muscato, R. Sinatra, “Kinematics, Dynamics and Control of a Hybrid Robot Wheeleg“ accepted for publication in the Journal Robotics and Autonomous Systems, December 2003