Reconfigurable and Adaptable Micro-Robots
Abstract : This report documents the mechanical structure, kinematic models and control implementation of two micro-robots, called Flipper and Crawler, that can traverse both on walls and floors. They are battery powered and use specially designed feet using suction cups. The design of these feet is described in Section 2. The mechanical design was arrived at through extensive analysis. It has a biped structure with revolute and prismatic hip joints. The underactuated mechanical structure was chosen to reduce weight and power consumption by decreasing the number of actuators. Micro-controllers from Motorola, Inc. and Texas Instruments, Inc. were used as embedded controllers with the ability to implement motion planning and trajectory generation algorithms to control these robots. The details are given in Sections 3 and 4. The report concludes with the summary and suggested improvements.