Design and realization of a novel reconfigurable robot with serial and parallel mechanisms

Civil rescue and military reconnaissance are domains that involve a great amount of manpower; and it is quite dangerous and laborious in a hostile environment. This paper presents a novel field robot JL-I based on reconfiguration for these applications. The robotic system consists of 3 uniform modules; each module is an entire robotic system that can perform distributed activities. In order to meet the requirements of highly adaptive locomotion capabilities, the applied mechanical structure of the robot is employed to drive the serial and parallel mechanisms to form an active joint for changing shape in three dimensions. After summarizing the basic functions provided by this system, the mechanical structure, the control system and the locomotion capabilities of JL-I are introduced in detail. Finally the successful, on-site tests confirm the principles described above and the robot's ability.