Paper Title
Autonomous Wheeling and Hopping Sphere Bot for Unknown Terrain Mission

Abstract
This paper describes the development of small rolling and hopping robots that are useful for many tasks in unknown rugged terrain, and are especially suited to celestial exploration in small gravity environments. the family of hopping or jumping, described here are characterized by discontinuous motion, whereby the robot stops after each jump to regain the upright position, recharge its jumping mechanism and localize itself. We describe the evolution of our hopping robot concept by way of prototypes that can be developed. These theoretical prototypes show that a small robot can move effectively by hopping provided that it is equipped with steering, jumping and self-righting capabilities. This paper gives the detailed pictures and descriptions of the mechanism of various prototypes. A hopping robot can jump over the barrier several times higher than its own height. The combination of the hopping movement and the wheeling movement can greatly enhance the scope of robot‘s activities. In this paper, a novel five-shank hopping mechanism was employed to build the wheeling hopping combination scout robot. The nonlinear character of the six-shank hopping mechanism was analyzed and then used in the proposed nonlinear spring-mass model for the robot. The rules of robot‘s movement were deduced, influencing factors of the jumping height were analyzed and the countermeasure was adopted. Finally, a simulation analysis and an experiment of the robot's movement were carried out. The results showed that the robot has strong locomotives and survival ability. Keywords— Hopping robots, spherical robots, planetary rovers, five shank mechanism, Non-linear spring Mass model, Elasticity, Autonomous robot.