Rapid pole climbing with a quadrupedal robot

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a legged robot designed for general locomotion of complex terrain but specialized for dynamical, high-speed climbing of a uniformly convex cylindrical structure, such as an outdoor telephone pole. This robot, the RiSE V3 climbing machine-mass 5.4 kg, length 70 cm, excluding a 28 cm tail appendage-includes several novel mechanical features, including novel linkage designs for its legs and a non-backdrivable, energy-dense power transmission to enable high-speed climbing. We summarize the robot's design and document a climbing behavior that achieves rapid ascent of a wooden telephone pole at 21 cm/s, a speed previously unachieved-and, we believe, heretofore impossible-with a robot of this scale. The behavioral gait of the robot employs the mechanical design to propel the body forward while passively maintaining yaw, pitch, and roll stability during climbing locomotion. The robot's general-purpose legged design coupled with its specialized ability to quickly gain elevation and park at a vertical station silently with minimal energy consumption suggest potential applications including search and surveillance operations as well as ad hoc networking. Reprinted from Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2009 (ICRA 2009)This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of the University of Pennsylvania's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to pubs-permissions@ieee.org. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it. Abstract-This paper describes the development of a legged robot designed for general locomotion of complex terrain but specialized for dynamical, high-speed climbing of a uniformly convex cylindrical structure, such as an outdoor telephone pole. This robot, the RiSE V3 climbing machine-mass 5.4 kg, length 70 cm, excluding a 28 cm tail appendage-includes several novel mechanical features, including novel linkage designs for its legs and a non-backdrivable, energy-dense power transmission to enable high-speed climbing. We summarize the robot's design and document a climbing behavior that achieves rapid ascent of a wooden telephone pole at 21 cm/s, a speed previously unachieved-and, we believe, heretofore impossible-with a robot of this scale. The behavioral gait of the robot employs the mechanical design to propel the body forward while passively maintaining yaw, pitch, and roll stability during climbing locomotion. The robot's general-purpose legged design coupled with its specialized ability to quickly gain elevation and park at a vertical station silently with minimal energy consumption suggest potential applications including search and surveilla...

Inspection of Flyover Bridges Using Quadrotor

“…A new-sophisticated field has born: the Bionics. For instance, The StickyBot has a hierarchical adhesive structure to hold itself on any kind of surface [5], the climbing RiSE V3 robot is designed for high-speed climbing of a uniformly cylindrical structure, such as a telephone or electricity pole [2]. The efficiency of these robots was satisfactory but still their acquisition is not financially justifiable.…”

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“…Future work intends to pursue similar comparisons for dynamic and fast climbing robots such as those described in [3] and [9].…”

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Gait Transitions for Quasi-static Hexapedal Locomotion on Level Ground

“…For example the partial order adjacency relation at the quadrupedal "half-bound" gait (for example reported in [8]) is computed as Considering legs in recirculation, this definition of adjacency makes intuitive sense: when multiple legs enter recirculation together, as legs within the same row of a tabloid would, it is possible for one leg to speed up while another slows, thus splitting the row apart as the current gait cell changes. Conversely, legs entering recirculation may wait indcfinitely for othcr legs-so long as the robot remains stat ically stable-such that they synchronize, merging rows of a tabloid.…”