Research on leg-wheel hybrid stair-climbing robot, Zero Carrier

It is greatly demanded that to develop a kind of stably stair climbing mobile vehicle to assist the physically handicapped in moving outdoors. In this paper, we first propose a novel leg-wheel hybrid stair-climbing vehicle, "Zero Carrier", which consists of eight unified prismatic-joint legs, four of which attached active wheels and other four attached passive casters. Zero Carrier can be designed lightweight, compact, powerful, together with its significant stability on stair climbing motion, since its mechanism is mostly concentrated in its eight simplified legs. We discuss the leg mechanism and control method of the first trial model, Zero Carrier I, and verify its performance based on the experiments of stair climbing and moving over obstacles performed by Zero Carrier I.