A Study on the optimal wheel allocation for leg/wheel mobile robots

Leg/wheel mobile robots, equipped with articulated legs which allow dynamic allocation of their wheel positions, are adaptable to the cluttered environments with its high mobility and stability. In this research, a real-time simultaneous model predictive locomotion and wheel allocation method is developed, which can be implemented into low speed embedded CPUs by the usage of the improved computation algorithm and index function. The proposed method is applied to a leg/wheel mobile robot with 3DOF SCARA legs to verify its enhanced performance.