Mechanism Design of a Mole-inspired Robot Burrowing with Forelimb for Planetary Exploration

As one of the burrowing animals in nature, moles have high burrowing efficiency, thanks to their sharp incisors and powerful forelimbs that burrow and scrape the soil. Mapping the burrowing ability of moles into the design of the star soil burrowing robot will be beneficial to the exploration of extraterrestrial bodies and resource exploitation. This paper proposes a mole-inpired burrowing robot with forelimb for planetary exploration. First, we briefly review the current research status of mole-inpired burrowing robots. And then, for the analysis of the skeleton and burrowing movement of moles, the design requirements of the head, spine, forelimb mechanism, and hindlimb mechanism of the robot in this paper were extracted, and the kinematics of the designed forelimb mechanism and hindlimb mechanism were analyzed to obtain the motion trajectories of the robotic limbs. Finally, the torque changes of the robotic forelimbs and hindlimbs at different rotational speeds during one cycle were analyzed using simulation software. The results show that the designed mole-inspired robot burrowing with forelimb is reasonable and can provide a reference for the design of burrowing robots.