Development of track-changeable quadruped walking robot TITAN X-design of leg driving mechanism and basic experiment-

We propose track-changeable quadruped walking robot, named “TITAN X”. TITAN X is a new leg-track hybrid mobile robot with a special leg driving system on each leg. A belt on each leg changes to a timing-belt in leg form and a track-belt in track form. TITAN X walks in leg form on rough terrain and makes tracked locomotion using track-belt on level or comparatively low-rough terrain. The characteristics of TITAN X are: 1) it has a hybrid function but is lightweight, 2) it has potential capabilities to demonstrate high-performance on highly-rough terrain. In this paper, details of leg design using a special belt are reported. Also form changing mechanisms are integrated into the system. We have constructed prototype of TITAN X to demonstrate basic performance. Experiments were conducted to verify the validity of the concept of track-changeable walking robot.