Design and modeling of a novel transformable land/air robot

This paper describes a novel transformable land/air robot that is capable of terrestrial locomotion and aerial locomotion. What is unusual about the robot is that it can transform between the two modes of locomotion at will through the transformable mechanism, allowing the robot to overcome large obstacles in their mission environment. The wheel mechanism of the robot is shared by both terrestrial and aerial locomotion, instead of simply adding a quadrotor to a wheeled mobile robot. The objective of this paper is to design the robot and establish the kinematic and dynamic models for the transformable process. Herein, we focus on the design of the driving wheels and transformable mechanism. A series of experiments about the energy analysis and the transformation from aerial locomotion mode to terrestrial locomotion mode were performed with the physical prototype; the experiment results confirmed the validity of our design and the theoretical analysis that are helpful to optimize the key parameters in our design. Moreover, our work can provide a reference for the study of the flying car.