Design and Performance Analysis of a Triphibious Robot With Tilting-Rotor Structure

Triphibious robots can move in more complex environment compared with common mobile robots, which makes the triphibious robots have a wider movement space and better environmental adaptability. This paper proposes an innovative design solution of a triphibious robot with the tilting-rotor structure (TR-TRS), which can change its motion mode to perform smoothly transition between different media, such as land, water, and air. First, the mechanical structure of the triphibious robot is described with design diagrams. Two tilting-rotors are mounted on the left and right side of a quadrotor-like aerial platform, in which four legs with passive wheel are integrated to make the triphibious robot move on land. Tilting-rotor structure is used to change the orientation of the rotors on both sides of the robot's fuselage, thus, through adjusting the orientation of these two rotors they can drive the triphibious robot to move on land and underwater. Next, according to the mechanical design, the motion modes in different environmental media are given, and the transition methods between different motion modes are explained in detail. Finally, the influence of tilting-rotor structure on the performance of the designed triphibious robot is analyzed and discussed by the results of virtual simulation. The superior performance of tilting-rotor structure in triphibious robots is demonstrated through the comparison of existing robots.