Study on Mechanism Design and Posture Control of a Wheel-Legged Vehicle

This paper introduces a new electric wheel-legged vehicle, which aims to improve the ability of unmanned mobile platform to perform multiple tasks in complex environment. The vehicle has the characteristics of both the leg-based system and wheel-based system, which has good obstacle crossing and fast-moving ability simultaneously. The structure form and function mode of the wheel-legged vehicle is designed. In order to analyze the overall motion of the vehicle, the kinematic model is established. The forward and inverse kinematics is calculated and the angle functions of each joint of the legs are presented. A set of posture control algorithm based on attitude analysis and inverse kinematics is designed for the vehicle, which is used to simulate the vehicle's height, roll and pitch motion. The simulation results preliminarily verify the rationality of mechanism design and the effectiveness of posture control.