# Design and Implementation of A Shape Shifting Rolling-Crawling-Wall-Climbing Robot
## 1 Introduction
The work mentioned in [13] describes the realization of amphibious robots by means of reconfigurable legs. This work brings together the benefits of bio-inspired design and reconfigurable robotics towards achieving multi-modal locomotion and dynamic gait generation. Authors also presented the development of the AmphiHex-I robot with a transformable flipper-leg that enables the composite propulsion mechanism to extend the robot's locomotion ability from land to water. The work mentioned in [14] discusses the development and simulation of the amphibious salamander robot that is capable of achieving multimode locomotion. In the above mentioned research work, authors demonstrated the application of a primitive neural network for swimming locomotion and its extension to recent limb oscillatory centres in order to explain the ability of salamanders to switch between walking and swimming. Furthermore, there is work reported on the development of a novel reconfigurable robot that can execute bio-inspired legged style locomotion by utilizing body articulation methods with passive leg attachments [15]. This research work presents the development of a novel bio-inspired reconfigurable robot called Scorpio (Figure 1) that can execute crawling, rolling and wall-climbing modes of locomotion. The novelty of our research work resides in the fruitful consolidation of bio-inspired principles and reconfigurable robot morphology that leads to the achievement of three complex modes of locomotion on a single miniaturised robot platform. This is the first ever attempt to integrate a crawling-rolling and wall-climbing mechanism on a single robot platform. The fundamental inspiration for the development of the Scorpio robot is from Cebranus Rechenbergi--a species that belongs to the huntsman spider family, commonly seen in the deserts of Morocco, that can perform the aforementioned three locomotion modes. The ability to crawl, roll and to climb a vertical wall surface enables the Scorpio robot to perform crawling over flat terrain, rolling over a slope and to extend its ability to explore terrains of various height levels by climbing walls. Hence, the Scorpio robot with crawling-rolling and wall-climbing capabilities can provide effective robotic solutions to urban reconnaissance. The main challenges in designing the robot include the reconfigurable mechanism, gait control and power electronics integration, as well as the non-trivial process of implementing theoretical design generated analytically into a physical mechanism. All the above mentioned challenges are addressed in this paper, concluding with the experimental results that validate the proposed approach. The reconfigurable Scorpio robot that we put forward in this research work is an initial design towards the development of an autonomous self-reconfigurable robot platform able to shape shift its morphology according to the perceived terrain. The rest of this article is organized as follows: The section \"Hardware Description\" introduces the mechanism design and system architecture of the Scorpio robot. The section \"Mathematical Model\" discusses the kinematic and dynamic model of the Scorpio robot. The section \"Experiments and Results\" discusses the validation trials that we followed in the development of the Scorpio Robot. This article concludes with the section \"Conclusion\" that concludes the study and mentions some future works to be done in this field of research.