Mechanical design and wheel–leg–body cooperation control of a step‐climbing robot

Abstract

This paper proposes the mechanical design and wheel-leg-body cooperation control of a robot capable of climbing stairs for the RoboMaster competition. The robot is comprised of a robot body and four legs with wheels on each end. The front and hind legs composed of the linkages and sliders complete the climbing stairs motion under the coordination of the motors and the cylinders. The dynamic stair-climbing motion is realized by control the wheel speed and leg motion corresponding to the body motion of the robot relative to the stair environment. Compared with the common split stair climbing designed, the robot can dynamically climb the stairs without losing the forward speed, which makes climbing stairs more smoothly while retaining the ability to move on the flat. Experimental results demonstrate that the robot can climb stairs with a riser height up to 20 cm and a tread depth more than 80 cm. And the process of climbing each stair is reduced to 1-2 s.

WheTLHLoc 4W: Small‐scale inspection ground mobile robot with two tracks, two rotating legs, and four wheels

“…The frame sequence in Figure 29 shows the robot utilizing tracked locomotion in an outdoor environment, successfully climbing an uneven and grassy slope with a 45°inclination. On the contrary, the frame sequence in Q-Whex (Zhang et al, 2023), Epi.q (Quaglia et al, 2014), Mantis (Bruzzone & Fanghella, 2014), the wheel-leg robot with cooperating body presented in Liu et al (2022), the Land Devil Ray (LDR) robot with passive transformable wheels (Bai et al, 2018), the robot with active transformable wheels presented in Sun et al (2017), the robot with a front auxiliary leg, Lazaro (García et al, 2017), the hybrid trackwheel robot RHyMo (Choi et al, 2017), and the WheTLHLoc 2W (Bruzzone et al, 2024).…”

“…Other hybrid robots with simplified leg architecture are characterized by separated rotating legs and wheels (Bruzzone & Fanghella, 2014), by wheels placed on articulated frames (Reina & Foglia, 2013), by articulated frames which collaborate with wheels and legs in the locomotion process touching the ground (Liu et al, 2022), by wheels capable of transforming into rotating legs through passive (Bai et al, 2018) or active (Sun et al, 2017) mechanisms, or by a front auxiliary leg to lift the robot over obstacles (García et al, 2017).…”

WAVES: Soft-Material Based Adaptable Walking-Type Stair-Climbing Robot for Various Step Sizes

“…Scissor stair climbing robot [7] lifts the robot's body through a fork lift scissors mechanism and pushing the body to the next step. Also, Liu et al designed a step-climbing robot that can quickly climbs stairs by folding the wheels and lifting the body with air cylinder pistons [8]. Such robots must stand on a single stair, so thier size is limited and they cannot climb small stairs.…”

Q‐Whex: A simple and highly mobile quasi‐wheeled hexapod robot

“…Another popular category comprises those legged robots with integrated wheels on their legs. The bipedal vehicles Handle (Boston, 2017) and Ascento (Klemm et al, 2019), the quadruped vehicles Momaro (Schwarz et al, 2017), SherpaTT (Cordes et al, 2018), MAMMOTH (Reid et al, 2020, 2016), the Wheeled‐ANYmal (Bjelonic et al, 2021), and the stair‐climbing robot in Liu et al (2022), and the hexapod vehicles ATHLETE (Wilcox et al, 2007) and BIT‐NAZA‐II (Z. Chen et al, 2021), have placed active wheels to the distal ends of the articulated legs. These articulated‐wheeled mechanisms enable active‐suspended wheeled locomotion at the expense of high‐cost mechanics and complex control strategies.…”