CObRaSO: Compliant Omni-Direction Bendable Hybrid Rigid and Soft OmniCrawler Module
This work addresses mobility challenges for robotic systems in constrained or uneven environments, representing a novel design rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of limited mobility in robotic crawlers by introducing CObRaSO, a novel omnidirectional bendable module that enables crawling in bent configurations, achieving enhanced performance through a hybrid rigid-soft design and demonstrating applications in various robotic platforms like in-pipeline, quadruped, and snake robots.
This paper presents a novel design of an Omnidirectional bendable Omnicrawler module- CObRaSO. Along with the longitudinal crawling and sideways rolling motion, the performance of the OmniCrawler is further enhanced by the introduction of Omnidirectional bending within the module, which is the key contribution of this paper. The Omnidirectional bending is achieved by an arrangement of two independent 1-DOF joints aligned at 90? w.r.t each other. The unique characteristic of this module is its ability to crawl in Omnidirectionally bent configuration which is achieved by a novel design of a 2-DOF roller chain and a backbone of a hybrid structure of a soft-rigid material. This hybrid structure provides compliant pathways for the lug-chain assembly to passively conform with the orientation of the module and crawl in Omnidirectional bent configuration, which makes this module one of its kind. Furthermore, we show that the unique modular design of CObRaSO unveils its versatility by achieving active compliance on an uneven surface, demonstrating its applications in different robotic platforms (an in-pipeline robot, Quadruped and snake robot) and exhibiting hybrid locomotion modes in various configurations of the robots. The mechanism and mobility characteristics of the proposed module have been verified with the aid of simulations and experiments on real robot prototype.