| Abstract: | This paper presents the impact analysis of a new dual-crawler-driven robot. This dual-crawler-driven robot is realized by connecting rigidly two crawler modules. In this newly proposed crawler module, a planetary gear reducer is deployed as the power transmission device to give two different outputs with just one actuator. Compared with the crawler driven by two actuators, our crawler module driven by one actuator could show good impact absorption when the robot collides with an obstacle due to the fact that there exists an output redundancy in each module. To determine what the advantage of our mechanism to the impact absorption is, impact analysis of the robot is conducted from the external components of the robot to its internal transmission parts while the robot encounters a collision with obstacles. The results of impact effect to the actuators in our mechanism are correspondingly derived in comparison with that in the conventional mechanism where each output is provided by one actuator. Numerical results are used to demonstrate the advantage of our mechanism on impact absorption. |
