Free-Climbing with a Multi-Use Robot

This paper presents a new four-limbed robot, LEMUR IIb (Legged Excursion Mechanical Utility Rover), that can free-climb vertical rock surfaces. This robot was designed to have a number of capabilities in addition to climbing (e.g., assembly, inspection, maintenance, transport, intervention) and to be able to traverse a variety of other types of terrain (e.g., roads, talus, dirt, urban rubble). To maximize its flexibility in this regard, LEMUR IIb will need to exploit sophisticated control, planning, and sensing techniques in order to climb, rather than rely on specific hardware modifications. In particular, this paper describes a new algorithm for planning safe one-step climbing moves, which has already enabled LEMUR IIb to climb an indoor, near-vertical surface with small, arbitrarily distributed, natural features. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first experimental demonstration of a multi-use, multi-limbed robot climbing such terrain using only friction at contact points (i.e., free-climbing).

[1]  Steven Dubowsky,et al.  The Force Workspace: A Tool for the Design and Motion Planning of Multi-Limb Robotic Systems , 1997 .

[2]  Timothy Bretl,et al.  Toward Autonomous Free-Climbing Robots , 2005, ISRR.

[3]  J.C. Grieco,et al.  A six-legged climbing robot for high payloads , 1998, Proceedings of the 1998 IEEE International Conference on Control Applications (Cat. No.98CH36104).

[4]  Jean-Claude Latombe,et al.  On Delaying Collision Checking in PRM Planning: Application to Multi-Robot Coordination , 2002, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[5]  Werner Neubauer.  A spider-like robot that climbs vertically in ducts or pipes , 1994, Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS'94).

[6]  S. Hirose,et al.  Machine that can walk and climb on floors, walls and ceilings , 1991, Fifth International Conference on Advanced Robotics 'Robots in Unstructured Environments.

[7]  Shigeo Hirose,et al.  Walking and running of the quadruped wall-climbing robot , 1994, Proceedings of the 1994 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[8]  Xu Dianguo,et al.  Development & Application of Wall-Climbing Robots , 1999, ICRA.

[9]  Timothy Bretl,et al.  Multi-Step Motion Planning for Free-Climbing Robots , 2004, WAFR.

[10]  Oussama Khatib,et al.  A unified approach for motion and force control of robot manipulators: The operational space formulation , 1987, IEEE J. Robotics Autom..

[11]  Seth Hutchinson,et al.  Using manipulability to bias sampling during the construction of probabilistic roadmaps , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[12]  Friedrich Pfeiffer,et al.  Control of an Eight Legged Pipe Crawling Robot , 1997, ISER.

[13]  Koichi Osuka,et al.  Development of vertically moving robot with gripping handrails for fire fighting , 2001, Proceedings 2001 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Expanding the Societal Role of Robotics in the the Next Millennium (Cat. No.01CH37180).

[14]  Jean-Daniel Boissonnat,et al.  Motion Planning of Legged Robots , 2000, SIAM J. Comput..

[15]  B. Faverjon,et al.  Probabilistic Roadmaps for Path Planning in High-Dimensional Con(cid:12)guration Spaces , 1996 .

[16]  Friedrich Pfeiffer,et al.  "MORITZ" a pipe crawler for tube junctions , 2003, 2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.03CH37422).

[17]  H. Dulimarta,et al.  Design and control of miniature climbing robots with nonholonomic constraints , 2002, Proceedings of the 4th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation (Cat. No.02EX527).

[18]  José Manuel Pastor,et al.  A climbing autonomous robot for inspection applications in 3D complex environments , 2000, Robotica.

[19]  Roque J. Saltarén,et al.  Motion planning of a climbing parallel robot , 2003, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[20]  Steven Dubowsky,et al.  A Simplified Cartesian-Computed Torque Controller for Highly Geared Systems and Its Application to an Experimental Climbing Robot , 2000 .

[21]  Hyoukryeol Choi,et al.  Self-contained wall-climbing robot with closed link mechanism , 2001, Proceedings 2001 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Expanding the Societal Role of Robotics in the the Next Millennium (Cat. No.01CH37180).

[22]  M. Rachkov.  Control of climbing robot for rough surfaces , 2002, Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Robot Motion and Control, 2002. RoMoCo '02..

[23]  Masayuki Inaba,et al.  Motion planning for humanoid robots under obstacle and dynamic balance constraints , 2001, Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.01CH37164).

[24]  Zahurin Samad,et al.  Development of a low-cost modular pole climbing robot , 2000, 2000 TENCON Proceedings. Intelligent Systems and Technologies for the New Millennium (Cat. No.00CH37119).

[25]  Takeo Kanade,et al.  Control system of the self-mobile space manipulator , 1994, IEEE Trans. Control. Syst. Technol..