Locomotion approach of REMORA: A reonfigurable mobile robot for manufacturing Applications

This paper presents the locomotion approach of a novel quadruped robot which is able to carry various effectors for achieving manufacturing tasks in large workspaces. Equipped with lockers on some of the passive joints and clamping devices at the end of its limbs, this quadruped uses eight actuators for achieving manufacturing tasks as well as locomotion tasks. In the following sections, we first present the proposed robot and its two working modes. Then, the locking strategy of the robot is formulated as an optimization problem. Also, a practical method for managing the limbs swinging movement is addressed. At last, the presented approach is applied on two concrete examples. Possessing a low degree of kinematic redundancy, the proposed quadruped shows a reasonable locomotion capacity which allows it to achieve locomotion with respect to some extra constrains in its workspaces.