Skating motion by a leg-wheeled robot with passive wheels

This paper presents a new type of mobile robot that was developed based on the idea of developing a robot with reduced number of Degree of Freedom (DOF). The higher the number of DOF implies that more actuators are being fixed onto the robot. This eventually results in a complicated control system, as well as influencing the energy efficiency of the robot. Besides that, more DOF will only add up the total weight of the robot, which is a disadvantage because lightweight robot is more likely to be applicable. In this study where a closed link mobile robot was made, number of active joints was lessened, while passive wheels were used for mobility to meet the objective of reducing the number of DOF. In this paper, we will discuss on the reasons behind the development of a reduced DOF robot, the mechanism of trajectory that allows the robot to move by skating, and finally the results to the experiments conducted.