Design of a Mechanism with Embedded Suspension to Reconfigure the Agri_q Locomotion Layout †
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, 10129 Torino, Italy
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Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
†
This paper is an extended version of our paper published in Visconte, C.; Cavallone, P.; Carbonari, L.; Botta, A.; Quaglia, G. Mechanism for the Locomotion Layout Reconfiguration of the Agri_q Mobile Robot. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Robotics in Alpe-Adria Danube Region (RAAD 2020), Kaiserslautern, Germany, 17–19 June 2020; pp. 390–399.
Robotics 2021, 10(1), 15; https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics10010015
Received: 10 December 2020
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Revised: 6 January 2021
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Accepted: 11 January 2021
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Published: 13 January 2021
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in European Robotics)
The Agri_q is an electric unmanned ground vehicle specifically designed for precision agriculture applications. Since it is expected to traverse on unstructured terrain, especially uneven terrain, or to climb obstacles or slopes, an eight-wheeled locomotion layout, with each pair of wheels supported by a bogie, has been chosen. The wide contact surface between the vehicle and the ground ensures a convenient weight distribution; furthermore, the bogie acts like a filter with respect to ground irregularities, reducing the transmissibility of the oscillations. Nevertheless, this locomotion layout entails a substantial lateral slithering along curved trajectories, which results in an increase of the needed driving torque. Therefore, reducing the number of ground contact points to compare the torque adsorption in different configurations, namely four, six, or eight wheels, could be of interest. This paper presents a reconfiguration mechanism able to modify the Agri_q locomotion layout by lifting one of the two wheels carried by the bogie and to activate, at the same time, a suspension device. The kinematic synthesis of the mechanism and the dynamic characteristics of the Agri_q suspended front module are presented.
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Keywords:
precision agriculture; Agri_q; mobile robot; UGV; agricultural robot; service robotics; sustainability; suspension
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MDPI and ACS Style
Visconte, C.; Cavallone, P.; Carbonari, L.; Botta, A.; Quaglia, G. Design of a Mechanism with Embedded Suspension to Reconfigure the Agri_q Locomotion Layout. Robotics 2021, 10, 15. https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics10010015
AMA Style
Visconte C, Cavallone P, Carbonari L, Botta A, Quaglia G. Design of a Mechanism with Embedded Suspension to Reconfigure the Agri_q Locomotion Layout. Robotics. 2021; 10(1):15. https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics10010015
Chicago/Turabian StyleVisconte, Carmen, Paride Cavallone, Luca Carbonari, Andrea Botta, and Giuseppe Quaglia. 2021. "Design of a Mechanism with Embedded Suspension to Reconfigure the Agri_q Locomotion Layout" Robotics 10, no. 1: 15. https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics10010015
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