WiXus: A Wheeled-Legged Robot with Wire-Driven Environmental Utilizing to Integrate Mobility and Manipulation

TL;DR

WiXus is a novel wheeled-legged robot that integrates wire-driven mechanisms and external environment utilization to enable versatile mobility and manipulation tasks beyond traditional locomotion.

Contribution

This paper introduces WiXus, a robot that combines wheeled-legged design with wire-driven actuation to expand its operational capabilities for mobility and object manipulation.

Findings

WiXus achieves planar and three-dimensional mobility, including cliff climbing.

WiXus successfully repurposes legs as arms for object manipulation.

Utilizing environment with wire-driven actuation extends robot functionality.

Abstract

Wheeled-legged robots, which have wheels at their feet and achieve high mobility by coordinating wheel drive and leg drive, have been developed. These robots have been developed purely as platforms specialized for locomotion. Therefore, they do not have a means to repurpose their legs for roles other than locomotion, such as object manipulation or tool utilization. In this paper, we address the problem of how to draw out the potential task-execution capability of the legs by freeing them from the roles of locomotion through external body support. To this end, we propose and develop a new robot, WiXus, which fuses a wheeled-legged mechanism with a wire-driven mechanism that utilizes the external environment. The developed WiXus demonstrates not only planar locomotion with wheeled-legged drive, but also three-dimensional mobility such as cliff climbing by coordinating wire-driven and wheeled-legged actuation. Furthermore, by suspending the body with wire-driven actuation, WiXus successfully repurpose its legs as arms to perform object manipulation, (e.g., rescuing a dog (stuffed animal)), and tool utilization (e.g., harvesting an apple (mockup) with loppers). This study demonstrates that the approach of utilizing the environment with wire-driven actuation is a new design principle that extends the operational domain of wheeled-legged robots.