Design and Performance of a Highly Mobile, Climbing, Wheeled, Soft-bodied Robot

Search-and-rescue presents high-risk environments and scenarios to human operators, making it well-recognized as an area for potential robotic contributions. Existing search-and-rescue robotic platforms are often too bulky to infiltrate the dense, complex terrain of a collapsed building, while small robotic platforms are lacking in functionality and practicality. There is a need for a robotic platform that is fast and agile on surfaces at all angles, while being compact enough to navigate rubble and gather information uninhibited. There is also an unexplored area in robotics at the intersection of wheeled and soft robotics. This thesis aims to address the need of a highly mobile small robot while initiating the exploration of this promising merger of fields. This work presents a design and proof-of-concept testing for a palm-sized vehicle that can travel quickly on and transition between planar surfaces at most angles relative to each other. The primary innovation of the design is the integration of wheeled and soft robotics. The tricycle-style vehicle uses magnetic wheels to adhere to surfaces and a soft, silicone body to introduce continuous, three degree-of-freedom mobility into the vehicle body. Individual components were optimized using theoretical and experimental analyses. The optimization results informed the design parameters of an integrated vehicle. Eight design parameters were further refined via iterative testing of the integrated vehicle variants in a controlled environment. The final vehicle was able to drive quickly on planar surfaces at any angle relative to gravity. It could transition between surfaces intersecting at angles as small as 70° and as large as 285° at any angle relative to gravity. This presents an advancement over existing vehicles, which are more limited in transition angle ranges and/or rely upon the positioning of the gravitational vector to perform the transition successfully. Additional capabilities of this soft-bodied vehicle include axial twisting of the silicone body to accommodate surface variations, and side-to-side bending for skid- free steering. Altogether, the presented vehicle demonstrates that the fundamental idea of the design concept – the merger of wheeled and soft robotics to achieve greater mobility – is sound and merits further consideration.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• LaRocca, Ava

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Youcef-Toumi, Kamal
• DeFronzo, Rebecca

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/144734

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/144734