A Rapid-Mode-Switching Small-Scale Crawling–Jumping Robot Based on a Dual-Clutch Mechanism

Conventional crawling–jumping robots often suffer from slow mode transitions and poor motion continuity, limiting their adaptability in complex environments. This paper presents a compact hybrid robot featuring a novel dual-clutch mechanism composed of an actively driven clutch and a passive clutch, enabling rapid, seamless transitions between crawling and jumping. The active clutch, driven by a single motor, controls elastic energy storage and release. In contrast, the passive clutch mechanically decouples the jumping and crawling modules during energy storage and enables automatic reset within 25 ms after takeoff. A dynamic jumping model and trajectory adjustment method are established, and analytical crossing criteria for trenches, obstacles, and platforms are derived. Experiments show that the robot achieves less than 3 s transition time from jumping to crawling, exhibits linearly controllable jumping height, and can actively regulate jump trajectories by independently adjusting crawling speed and takeoff velocity. The robot successfully traverses obstacles up to 2.7 times its body length. The proposed design provides an effective solution for rapid transitions between multimodal locomotion in small-scale robots.