  The selection of mobility modes for robot navigation consists of various
trade-offs. Snake robots are ideal for traversing through constrained
environments such as pipes, cluttered and rough terrain, whereas bipedal robots
are more suited for structured environments such as stairs. Finally, quadruped
robots are more stable than bipeds and can carry larger payloads than snakes
and bipeds but struggle to navigate soft soil, sand, ice, and constrained
environments. A reconfigurable robot can achieve the best of all worlds.
Unfortunately, state-of-the-art reconfigurable robots rely on the rearrangement
of modules through complicated mechanisms to dissemble and assemble at
different places, increasing the size, weight, and power (SWaP) requirements.
We propose Reconfigurable Quadrupedal-Bipedal Snake Robots (ReQuBiS), which can
transform between mobility modes without rearranging modules. Hence, requiring
just a single modification mechanism. Furthermore, our design allows the robot
to split into two agents to perform tasks in parallel for biped and snake
mobility. Experimental results demonstrate these mobility capabilities in
snake, quadruped, and biped modes and transitions between them.
