WiXus: A Wheeled-Legged Robot with Wire-Driven Environmental Utilizing to Integrate Mobility and Manipulation
Shintaro Inoue, Kento Kawaharazuka, Temma Suzuki, Sota Yuzaki, Kei Okada
AI summary
Problem
Wheeled-legged robots are limited to ground-based locomotion and cannot operate in vertical or overhead spaces, nor repurpose their legs for manipulation.
Approach
The robot anchors wires to external structures to suspend its body, freeing its wheeled legs from ground contact so they can function as arms while enabling cliff climbing and 3D navigation.
Key results
- Planar locomotion with simultaneous SLAM mapping
- Cliff climbing via coordinated wire-winding and wheel drive
- Suspended object manipulation using repurposed wheeled legs
- Tool utilization (e.g., operating loppers) while wire-suspended
Why it matters
Provides a new design principle for extending wheeled-legged robots into 3D operational domains for outdoor, agricultural, and disaster-response tasks.
Abstract
Wheeled-legged robots, which have wheels at their feet and achieve high mobility by coordinating wheel drive and leg drive, have been developed. These robots have been devel- oped purely as platforms specialized for locomotion. Therefore, they do not have a means to repurpose their legs for roles other than locomotion, such as object manipulation or tool utilization. In this paper, we address the problem of how to draw out the potential task-execution capability of the legs by freeing them from the roles of locomotion through external body support. To this end, we propose and develop a new robot, WiXus, which fuses a wheeled-legged mechanism with a wire-driven mechanism that utilizes the external environment. The developed WiXus demonstrates not only planar locomotion with wheeled-legged drive, but also three-dimensional mobility such as cliff climbing by coordinating wire-driven and wheeled- legged actuation. Furthermore, by suspending the body with wire-driven actuation, WiXus successfully repurpose its legs as arms to perform object manipulation, (e.g., rescuing a dog (stuffed animal)), and tool utilization (e.g., harvesting an apple (mockup) with loppers). This study demonstrates that the approach of utilizing the environment with wire-driven actuation is a new design principle that extends the operational domain of wheeled-legged robots.