Modeling and Analysis of the Hopping Pneumatic Mechanism for a Scout Robot

To enhance the motion and survival abilities of a scout robot,the hopping movement and the wheeling movement are combined to develop a new scout robot.A new hopping pneumatic mechanism is employed to realize robotic jumping motion.The characteristics of the hopping pneumatic mechanism are introduced,and the relationship among several coupled parameters in pneumatic hopping is deduced.The influencing factors of the jumping height are analyzed,and a new method is proposed to control the jumping height by adjusting the opening time of the directional control valve.Finally,analysis on obstacle-overcoming capability and the experimental verification are carried out on the designed pneumatic hopping robot.The results show the reasonability and applicability of the new pneumatic hopping mechanism of the scout robot.