An Investigation of Motion of a Crawling Robot with Supports with Controllable Friction

This paper deals with the gait of a robot crawling on a horizontal rough surface with dry friction. A distinctive feature of the device is the presence of two supporting elements with a controlled coefficient of friction, which allows for alternately fixing the supports on the surface. As a result of numerical simulation, the patterns (laws) of influence on the motion characteristics of the mass-dimensional and control parameters of the robot, as well as the parameters of the supporting surface, are obtained, so that it is possible to find application in the design of the specified devices.