Expanding scissor-based UGV for large obstacles climbing

This research proposes a new extendable platform for an unmanned ground vehicle to overcome the obstacle climbing issue. The new platform is basically established on scissor mechanism principles which have been innovated to achieve long and rigid displacement. A couple of scissor mechanisms are embedded in the rover platform adjusting the mass center of rover respect to the rear and front wheels. Accordingly, it yields geometric control of the contact forces, which can simultaneously reduce the slip of the wheels and increase the performance of the obstacle climbing up. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed platform, the 3D kinematics is derived. Subsequently, the stick-slip Euler-Lagrange dynamics is derived and a three-level controller including the torque optimization is implemented to simulate the rover facing obstacles. Finally, without any hardware prototyping, the extendable rover is simulated and compared with a typical fixed-geometry rover to show the enhancement of the climbing ability by using the proposed concept. Moreover, controlling the normal contact forces of the wheels yields the slip reduction, which subsequently, increases the traction force.