Robust Design of a Screw-Based Crawling Robot on a Granular Surface

In this paper, a robust design of a screw wheel is presented, based on the Taguchi method to accelerate a screw-based crawling robot. Screw-based crawling robots have been studied before, but their application is limited because of their limited speed. To solve this problem, robust design is applied for the screw wheel geometry driving on granular surfaces, such as desert sand, which has not been studied before. Each of the four parameters determining the screw wheel geometry and two user conditions were set at three levels, and the Taguchi method was applied through the L
₉
(3
⁴
) orthogonal array. The experimentally optimized parameters were as follows: the slope angle was 35°, the height of the blade was 14 mm, the number of spirals was one, and the blade had a semicircular cross-section. A verification experiment was conducted with the optimized model to verify the Taguchi method's validity. In conclusion, the robust design using the Taguchi method is suitable for solving the speed problem of a screw-based crawling robot on a granular surface.