Winai Chonnaparamutt

• The concepts of Urban Search and Rescue robots have been developed since the great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in Japan in 1995. A tracked locomotion is the most suitable platform to surmount obstacles and be able to adapt to terrain variations in these environments. Nevertheless, the tracked locomotion that has only one pair of tracks will suffer from coping with rough terrain. The common solution is to use additional tracks that can change their posture relative to the main robot body, a so-called flipper. The typical mechanism is to directly drive the flipper joint with a spur or worm gear, a belt, or a chain drive. The great risk is a broken-joint of the flipper due to the unpredicted high force from shocks or impacts on the flipper when the flipper is moved under load or the robot drives over bumps, stairs, etc. To overcome the flaws,a novel flipper has been developed. The mechanism uses the passive link and the ball screw as the shock absorber. Moreover, the flipper also has modular feature. The control system is designed based on the fuzzy logic control. The promising performance has been verified by series of simulation results that the flipper can be employed as a main tool to support the robot for coping with any kind of obstacles autonomously.