Development of Conical Spring-based Jumping Mechanism for a Portable Robot

소형로봇을 위한 원추형 스프링 기반의 도약 메커니즘의 개발

It is desirable that the guard robot should be small-sized and light-weighted to increase its portability. In addition, it should be able to overcome a relatively high obstacle to cope with different situations. The jumping robot can reach a higher place more rapidly than other locomotion methods. This research proposes the jumping mechanism based on the conical spring for a small robot. Both the clutch mechanism and conical spring are incorporated into the jumping mechanism. In the clutch mechanism, the spring can be immediately compressed and released by one actuator with the planetary gear train and one-way clutch. The robot equipped with the jumping mechanism can overcome the obstacles which are higher than its height. In this paper, the characteristic of the conical spring for the jumping robot is determined and the small-sized, lightweight jumping mechanism is developed. The validity of the jumping mechanism was verified by various experiments. It is shown that the robot using this mechanism can provide good mobility in the rough terrain.