The intelligent leg design for cockroach robots based on differential gear structure

In the design of cockroach robots, a major requirement is to increase the carrying capacity of the robots. This paper proposes a novel configuration for the leg design of cockroach robots. In this configuration, the operating principle of a differential gear in a car is used in the design of multi-legged robots, so the carrying capacity is doubled at the same situation, compared with conventional linkage based robots. Firstly, the movement performance of the mechanism, including the inverse kinematics is analyzed and a decoupling algorithm is presented to control the prototype. Secondly, the working space and carrying capacity is calculated and analyzed. Then the whole model is simulated by the combination of MATLAB and ADAMS. The result of the simulation shows an improved performance, which indicates that the mechanism design is reasonable and the analysis is correct.