A Low-Energy Consumption Planning Method for Multi-Locomotion Wheel-Legged Mobile Robots

Mobile robots can replace humans to fulfill tasks in dangerous environments, which has been a research focus in recent years. This paper proposes a wheel-legged mobile robot with multi-locomotion and a low-energy consumption planning method. Different from the existing wheel-legged mobile robots, it can realize low-energy movement in different terrains with simple structures, and it can realize three modes: synchronous, tumbling, and curl–stretch. Then, based on the kinematics and dynamics model, a low-energy planning method is proposed, and low-energy motion planning is carried out for the three modes to obtain the low-energy driving law in each mode. A robot prototype is developed, and the experimental results show that the robot can move through the three modes with lower energy consumption in all three terrains. The planning method provides an effective reference for applying wheel-legged mobile robots.