Design and Demonstration of a Flying-Squirrel-Inspired Jumping Robot with Two Modes

The jumping–gliding robot is a kind of locomotion platform with the capabilities to jump on the ground and glide through the air. The jumping of this robot has to juggle the requirements of initial velocity and posture for entry to gliding and progressing on the ground. Inspired by flying squirrels, we proposed the concept of flexible wing-limb blending platform and designed a robot with two jumping modes. The robot can takeoff with different speeds and stances, and adjust aerial posture using the swing of forelimbs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first miniature and bio-inspired jumping robot that can autonomically change the speeds and stances when takeoff. Experimental results show that the robot can takeoff at about 3 m/s and pitch angle of 0° in the mode of jumping for gliding and adjust the pitch angle at the top to 0°~10° by actuating the forelimbs swing according to the requirement of gliding. In the mode of jumping for progress, the robot can takeoff at about 2 m/s with a pitch angle of 20° and then intermittently jump with a distance of 0.37 m of once jump and an average progress speed of 0.2 m/s. The robot presented in this paper lays the foundation for the development of flexible wing-limb blending platform, which is capable of jumping and gliding.