Traditional mobile robots are mainly divided into wheeled robots and legged robots. They have good performance at fast-moving speeds and crossing obstacles, and weak terrain adaptability and moving speeds, respectively. Combining the advantages of these two types mentioned, a multi-functional wheel-legged hexapod robot with strong climbing capacity was designed in this paper. Each wheel-leg of the robot is driven directly by a single motor and can move smoothly and quickly in a diagonal tripod gait. Based on the obstacle-crossing way of the wheel-leg and combined with the characteristics of insects moving stably in nature, the middle part of the robot body is wider than head and tail. Tripod gait was selected to control the robot locomotion. A series of simulations and experiments were conducted to validate its excellent adaptability to various environmental conditions. The robot can traverse rugged, broken, and obstacle-ridden ground and cross rugged surfaces full of obstacles without any terrain sensing or actively controlled adaptation. It can negotiate obstacles of approximately its own height, which is much higher than its centre of gravity range.
Keywords: biomimetics; motion gait; motor control; trajectory planning; wheel-legged robot.