Mechanical design for reinforcing miniature mobile robots' anti-impact capability and experimental verification

Secret reconnaissance and surveillance in spatially constrained spot are demanded in many antiterrorism activities. The special applications require a kind of miniature mobile robot to function covertly in highly confined environments. Thrown deployment mode for robots could be adopted. However, the crucial problem coping with the impact resulted from thrown miniature mobile robots' falling to the ground, is the difficulty of designing anti-impact machine. This paper presents a kind of mechanical design for reinforcing miniature mobile robots' anti-impact capability so that miniature mobile robots (“BMS-2”) carry out reconnaissance and surveillance tasks in confined region by thrown deployment mode. The inflatable wheels with damping spring and damping lid are designed as the crucially damping devices for robots' anti-impact machine. Also the principle for design and the relatively auxiliary design are discussed. Finally, the finite element analysis and several experiments show that the anti-impact mechanical design of BMS-2 is useful for attenuating the impact resulting from robots' falling to the ground, when Miniature Mobile Robots are thrown for carrying out missions in confined spaces.