Characteristic Analysis on Land for an Amphibious Spherical Robot

In recent years, all kinds of underwater robot have been developed owing to having been widely used in narrow pipelines, underwater detection or complicated underwater spaces full with reefs. An amphibious spherical robot is presented in the paper. The paper has focused on characteristic analysis on land for an amphibious spherical robot. An amphibious spherical robot includes a circular acrylic plate, a sealed hemispheroid and four drive units. Each of them consists of a water-jet propeller and two servo motors. The rotation angle of the servo motor can be changed by adjusting the duty ratio of the motor. A variety of sports gait can be achieved by adjusting the robot's leg movement sequence. Meanwhile, crawling gait and trotting gait experiments have been carried out for evaluating the performance of the amphibious spherical robot on tile floor and brick floor. From the experiment results, the robot has a higher walking speed on tile floor. Besides, the speed of walking robot will increase with the increase of frequency. When the frequency is lower than 2HZ, the maximum speed of robot can reach 6.67cm/s. Experiments proved that it is feasible to study performance evaluation for robot. The study of gait analysis is the research foundation for amphibious spherical robot.