THROO: A Tracked Hybrid Rover to Overpass Obstacles

In this paper the design, simulation and experimental tests are presented for THROO: a Tracked Hybrid Rover, which has been developed to Overpass Obstacles. The proposed mobile robot has 3-DOFs and it is capable of straight motion, turning ability and two operations, namely rover-like motion with tracks on flat terrain and walking-like motion with track and legs to overpass obstacles on move on uneven terrain. The leg mechanism is composed by a four-bar linkage, which has been synthesized according to desired features. In particular, the Burmester problem, which aims at finding the geometric parameters of a four-bar linkage required for a prescribed set of finitely separated poses is solved for the case understudy. Dynamic simulations have been carried out and a prototype has been built. The proposed results show the hybrid rover ability to overpass obstacles, which size is comparable or greater than the track high.