Agile and Energy-Efficient Jumping–Crawling Robot Through Rapid Transition of Locomotion and Enhanced Jumping Height Adjustment

A small-scale jumping–crawling robot expands the accessible region of a robot by selectively performing suitable locomotion type. However, the parallel elastic actuation for jumping, which amplifies a lightweight actuator's limited power, couples the motion between the energy storing process and the crouching of the jumping linkage. This coupling hinders the quick transition of the locomotion from jumping to crawling and limits the jumping height control. Furthermore, these two defects degrade the agility and the energy-efficiency of the robot. In this article, we present a jumping–crawling robot with enhanced agility and energy-efficiency by decoupling the energy storage and crouching of the jumping linkage. The decoupling is achieved by implementing a passive clutch that properly switches the connection between the energy storage component and the jumping linkage. As a result, the proposed jumping–crawling robot can promptly change the locomotion type, and can adjust the jumping height from 0.1 to 0.8 m. These features reduce the time and energy consumption of the jumping–crawling robot during the demonstration of multimodal locomotion up to 40 and 30% respectively, compared to the robot without the proposed decoupling approach.