Reconfigurable foot-to-gripper leg for underwater bottom operator, Hexaquad

This paper presents the development of a configurable leg-to-arm for configurable robot, named Hexapod-to-Quadruped (Hexaquad) robot, which is designed and developed for riverbed/seabed exploration and related works. Reconfigurable legged robot, one of robotics research areas, is generally focused on optimizing the usage of leg during locomotion. Until recently, most of the researches have emphasized on leg reconfigurable design in order to solve issues related to fault tolerant, stability, multitasking and energy efficiency. However, the emphasis of Hexaquad robot is on providing optimum leg usage, actuation configuration as well as satisfying the legged robot stability criterion in reconfiguration mechanism. Inspired by foot-to-gripper (FTG) transformation of crab chelipads, each leg of the proposed Hexaquad robot have mass affect avoidance. The minimum torque on each leg joint is calculated as well as FTG using static torque calculation on multi-link structure before selecting the actuator/motor. Performance tests are done by performing fundamental testing on optimum standing posture, stress and displacement analysis on FTG model, including gripping tests to several shapes of objects both in the air and underwater environment.