This paper presents a new bio-inspired leg-wheel robot “HopMote” that can serve as a hopping node for mobile sensor networks. The proposed robot, which is 9cm in height and 250g in weight, can leap over obstacles more than 4 times its own size. It depends on the elastic elements in a six-bar linkage leg system to enable jump locomotion. It can also roll freely and change its directions by the two-wheeled differential drive system. It adopts the ZigBee protocol for wireless communication and therefore can be added to a ZigBee-based sensor network as a mobile video sensor node. Its effectiveness is verified by some performance tests including jump locomotion and multi-hop image transmission.
