Development of Implicit-Explicit Control Based Amphibious Centipede-Type Robot and Evaluation of its Mobile Performance

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel amphibious centipede-type robot that uses a unified implicit-explicit control scheme, enabling effective navigation on land and water with optimized leg structures, simplifying environment adaptation.

Contribution

The study introduces a simple, unified control approach and innovative leg design for amphibious robots, reducing complexity in environment switching and improving mobility across terrains.

Findings

Identified an optimal leg structure for dual-environment navigation.

Validated the unified control scheme through experimental locomotion tests.

Achieved reduced leg slip rate and energy consumption in tests.

Abstract

Multi-legged mobile robots possess high mobility performance in rough terrain environments, stemming from their high postural stability, joint flexibility, and the redundancy provided by multiple legs. In prior research on navigating between different environments such as land and water, the primary strategy employed involves switching to a controller that generates an appropriate gait for the new environment upon entering it. However, designing appropriate gaits for each complex and diverse environment and accurately determining controller switching for each environment is challenging. Therefore, this research develops a centipede-type mobile robot that navigates both aquatic and terrestrial environments with a simple, unified control scheme, based on the implicit-explicit control philosophy and by ingeniously designing the robot's body structure. In this research, we developed the robot featuring flexible joints and left and right legs on each body segment and focused on the leg structure which has extensive contact with the environment. This paper evaluates the locomotion performance on land and water using the three developed leg structures, using the robot's leg slip rate and actuator energy consumption as evaluation metrics. The experimental results confirmed the existence of an appropriate leg structure capable of navigating both aquatic and terrestrial environments under identical control.