WiXus: A Wheeled-Legged Robot with Wire-Driven Environmental Utilizing to Integrate Mobility and Manipulation
This work introduces a design principle for wheeled-legged robots to extend their functionality beyond locomotion, enabling manipulation without dedicated arms.
WiXus integrates wheeled-legged locomotion with wire-driven environmental support to enable legs to be repurposed for manipulation, demonstrating cliff climbing and tasks like object rescue and tool use.
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 developed 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.