WiXus: A Wheeled-Legged Robot with Wire-Driven Environmental Utilizing to Integrate Mobility and Manipulation

2026-05-20

AI Summary

This work proposes a novel paradigm for wheeled-legged robots by integrating an environment-anchored cable-driven mechanism, enabling the robot to repurpose its legs as manipulator arms while suspended. Traditional wheeled-legged platforms are limited to locomotion and struggle with dexterous manipulation tasks. By synergistically coordinating wheeled-leg actuation with the cable-driven system, the robot achieves unified mobility and manipulation capabilities across multiple operational modes—including planar traversal, cliff climbing, and suspended operation—facilitating both three-dimensional motion and fine manipulation. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach significantly extends the functional versatility of wheeled-legged robots in practical scenarios such as search-and-rescue and fruit harvesting, effectively overcoming their conventional limitations in task execution.

Abstract

Wheeled-legged robots, which have wheels at their feet and achieve high mobility by coordinating wheel drive and leg drive, have been developed. These robots have been developed purely as platforms specialized for locomotion. Therefore, they do not have a means to repurpose their legs for roles other than locomotion, such as object manipulation or tool utilization. In this paper, we address the problem of how to draw out the potential task-execution capability of the legs by freeing them from the roles of locomotion through external body support. To this end, we propose and develop a new robot, WiXus, which fuses a wheeled-legged mechanism with a wire-driven mechanism that utilizes the external environment. The developed WiXus demonstrates not only planar locomotion with wheeled-legged drive, but also three-dimensional mobility such as cliff climbing by coordinating wire-driven and wheeled-legged actuation. Furthermore, by suspending the body with wire-driven actuation, WiXus successfully repurpose its legs as arms to perform object manipulation, (e.g., rescuing a dog (stuffed animal)), and tool utilization (e.g., harvesting an apple (mockup) with loppers). This study demonstrates that the approach of utilizing the environment with wire-driven actuation is a new design principle that extends the operational domain of wheeled-legged robots.

Problem

• wheeled-legged robot
• mobility and manipulation
• environmental utilization
• leg repurposing
• task-execution capability

Innovation

• wheeled-legged robot
• wire-driven actuation
• environmental utilization
• mobility-manipulation integration
• leg repurposing