• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.30 no.10
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• pp.1023-1029
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• 2013

Water running animals such as basilisk lizards have an advantage of high-speed movement and high power efficiency on water; so researchers in robotic fields have been interested in the water running locomotion. This paper presents prototype-design and experimental study on the fourand six-legged water running robot. Based on the previously proposed quadruped water running robot, we assemble a hexapedal water running robot. The legs of the water running robot are designed based on four-bar parallel link for repeated motion along to pre-defined path. Stability performance of the quadruped and hexapedal water running robot are investigated by experiments on rolling criterion. As a result, hexapedal robot performs better stability than quadruped robot. Based on the hexapedal robot design, we are planning to optimize the position of legs and operating frequency.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.20 no.9
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• pp.936-941
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• 2014

Walking mechanisms are very important for legged robots to ensure their stable locomotion. In this research, Klann-linkage is suggested as a walking mechanism for a water-running robot and is optimized using level average analysis. The structure of the Klann-linkage is introduced first and design variables for the Klann-linkage are identified considering the kinematic task of the walking mechanism. Next, the design problem is formulated as a path generation optimization problem. Specifically, the desired path for the foot-pad is defined and the objective function is defined as the structural error between the desired and the generated paths. A process for solving the optimization problem is suggested utilizing the sensitivity analysis of the design variables. As a result, optimized lengths of Klann-linkage are obtained and the optimum trajectory is obtained. It is found that the optimized trajectory improves the cost function by about 62% from the initial one. It is expected that the results from this research can be used as a good example for designing legged robots.