Developing Of A Wheel-propeller Integrated Amphibious Robot

With the developing of society and technology, it is increasingly recognized thatamphibious environment is very important. Amphibious environment is not onlyecologically valuable but also critical to military operations. Currently thedevelopment and protection of it is still in the initial stages, wheeled trolley is mainlyused in environmental monitoring, intelligence gathering, which doesn’t haveamphibious capability. At the same time rarely amphibious robot can be directly usedin practical application.Therefore, the purpose of this project is to develop an amphibious robot, it willbe applied on amphibious environment protection, development and militaryoperations. This robot will be powered by wheel-propeller integrated drivingmechanisms. Eventually this kind of robot will form an robot group and use networkas a platform for move coordination, task allocation. Therefore this subject didresearch work as below:First, for the issues of amphibious robot’s efficiency and adaptability to swamp,this paper merged off-road tires and dynamic webbed paddle wheel together andproposed a new integrated wheel paddle propulsion. The propulsion was designedaccording to a new design process which combined with the structural design of therobot body. During the propulsion design process, the body was simulated in Fluentfor better designed propulsion.To verify the rationality of the design and find howangles of the blades changed in water, the mechanism was simulated in Adams.Second, according to theories of vessels, the water surface stability of the robotwas divided to three parts: small-angle tilt stability, large-angle tilt stability anddynamic stability. In the case of small-angle tilting, robot’s stability radius andstability height were found through the equal volume tilt waterline method.Considering the specific situation of the robot, large-angle tilt stability was analyzedfor the transverse stability graph based on a method which combined variabledisplacement calculation method and integral method. Finally, according to thepreviously obtained static stability curve and kinetic energy theorem, this paperobtained dynamic stability arm curve of the robot.At last, a prototype robot was made according to the virtual model and thensealed. In order to test the prototype robot’s performance on speed, sealing andswitching between land and water, several experiments had been carried out on land and water. Results showed that the prototype robot achieved desired designspecifications.