Monish Koshy, final year student, M.Tech. RAU, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Amritapuri Campus, won the Best Research Paper Award for his paper titled “Mechanical Design and Analysis of Hybrid Mobile Robot with Aerial and Terrain Locomotion Capability” at the 3^rd International Conference on Design, Analysis, Manufacturing and Simulation (ICDAMS-2018), which was conducted from April 6-7, 2018.

The event was organised by the Department of Mechanical and Automobile Engineering, Saveetha School of Engineering, Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences, Chennai, India. The paper will also be published in Scopus Indexed MATEC Web of Conferences Proceedings and will be indexed in Google Scholar, CAS, Compendex, Inspec, DOAJ and CPCI (Web of Science).

The research work was done under the guidance of Anjai Krishnan, Faculty Associate, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Amritapuri Campus, who also co-authored the paper along with Sreevishnu S., M.Tech. RAU, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Amritapuri Campus, in association with MISR (Mechatronics and Intelligence Systems Research) Lab.

In this paper, a combined robotic system of a quadruped and a quadrotor is introduced. This design is inspired by the way in which birds use their wings and legs for stability in slopped and uneven surfaces. This robot has a unique ability to fly to remote places, then walk to perform close-range operations in the field. The main idea is that a quadrotor can be used to tackle large obstacles by flying over them and the four legs make the robot able to walk statically stable and provide easy movement on uneven surfaces. Thus, the robot can be used as a first responder and it can rush to a spot where there is an emergency. It can respond before human first responders get to the site.

The robots can be used to construct three-dimensional maps of the environment or an area of interest. They can be used to get the entire information of the area in detail, including spotting trapped victims. The information obtained provides human first responders with situational awareness well before they get to the scene. Hence, they can be better equipped and they don’t get into harm’s way. 

These platforms offer unique capabilities suited for search and rescue, disaster zone assistance, environmental conservation, and surveillance. This paper elucidates the mechanical design and analysis of a hybrid locomotion robot. The solid model of the robot was made using CATIA and further analysis like static analysis, computational fluid dynamics analysis and drop test analysis were performed in ANSYS.