Design, Modeling and Simulation of a Novel Two-Wheeled Hopping Robot

A novel two-wheeled hopping robot is proposed in this paper. The robot is designed for traveling fast on the flat road and leaping over the obstacles by hopping. The two wheels of the robot are driven independently and it turns in the differential mode. The leadscrew nut mechanism and four bar mechanism are used for hopping. A set of gear transmission system and cable structure are combined to realize the switching between the forward mode and the hopping mode. The kinematics of the robot is analyzed through the simulation of virtual prototype and dynamic modeling is established based on Euler-Lagrange formalism. Based on the traditional inverted pendulum model, the elastic potential energy is introduced to modify the dynamic equations. The simulation of the system has also been investigated.