Structure Design and Motion Planning of a Reconfigurable Robot with Flexible Waist

Footed robots have significant application value in high-risk and high-intensity work scenarios such as field detection, rescue and disaster relief, and cargo handling. In this paper, a reconfigurable robot with flexible waist is proposed based on the traditional footed robot. The degrees of freedom of the hip joint and femoral joint of the robot allow the robot to realize reconfiguration of three forms of mammal, crawling and arthropods, and the degree of freedom of the waist allows the robot to twist its own trunk, coordinate various actions, and improve sports performance to adapt to a variety of complex environments. In this paper, the reconfiguration process of the robot is planned in detail, and the simulation is carried out by ADAMS software. Finally, a physical prototype was formed and the reconfiguration performance of the robot was tested.