The prototype of our micro robot includes two suction cups and two legs, with one suction cup attached to each leg. Altogther, the robot has 4 joints controlled by 3 motors. This design requires two of the joints be controlled as coupled joints. As a result, the couple joints introduces asymmetricity to the design and software control.
In the following simplified diagram, joint-2 and joint-3 are the coupled joints controlled by a single motor. Joint-2 always rotates twice as much as joint-3 does.
With this design, the robot is capable of moving on a flat flat surface as well as making a transition from one flat surface to the other.
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The following animated picture was created using POVRAY on our Linux machine.
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Check out several animation images of the above concept.