ROMERIN: A new concept of a modular autonomous climbing robot

Abstract

Climbing robots play an essential role in performing inspection work in civil infrastructures. These tasks require autonomous robots with competitive costs and the ability to adapt to different types of environments. This article presents ROMERIN, a new concept of a modular legged climbing robot where each leg is an autonomous robotic module in terms of processing capacity, control, and energy. The legs are equipped with suction cups that allow the robot to adhere to different types of surfaces. The proposed design allows the creation of climbing robots with a different number of legs to perform specific inspection tasks. Although each of the legs acts as an independent robot, they have the ability to share information and energy. The proposed control concept enables the development of climbing robots with the ability to adapt to different types of inspection tasks and with resilience characteristics. This article includes a description of the mechatronic design, the kinematics of the seven degree-of-freedom robotic legs, including the adhesion system, and the architecture of the control and simulation system. Finally, we present experimental results to test the modularity concept, mechanical design, and electronics using a four-legged robot configuration. We analyze the performance of the gripping system in different situations on four different surfaces and the behavior of the control architecture for two different robot body trajectories.

A Review and Evaluation of Control Architectures for Modular Legged and Climbing Robots

“…Reverse articulated torque under the unreasonable walking way LAURON V [8], ANYmal [9], ATHLETE [10], ROMERIN [11,12] High maneuverability, high mobile speed, and high energy efficiency…”

“…The Modular Climbin and Legged Robotic Organism Architecture [ 26 ] arises to control a modular legged and climbing robotic organism. The authors improve the performance of the behavior-based architecture for the robot ROMHEX [ 28 ] and extend its use to the ROMERIN robot [ 11 , 12 ]. MoCLORA is implemented in C++ and uses ROS2 communication tools to share information between architecture components and devices ( Figure 18 ).…”

MoCLORA—An Architecture for Legged-and-Climbing Modular Bio-Inspired Robotic Organism

“…Based on the idea of reducing complexity, modularizing and releasing workload from the CC, we propose a 7 DOF robotic module [ 16 ], which serves as a tool of a whole organism to walk and climb ( Figure 2 ). Having more than 6 DOF allows the module to select the most suitable and safer configuration, optimizing the torque that appears at critical joints.…”

“…The proposed robotic organism is based on the modules presented in [ 16 ]. These modules have the ability to share energy in such a way that if the battery of one module stops working for any reason, the rest of the modules can share their energy, increasing the robustness of the organism.…”

ROMERIN: Organismo robótico escalador basado en patas modulares con ventosas activas

“…Este artículo se centra en la coordinación de los módulos presentados en Hernando et al (2022). Estos módulos tienen la capacidad de compartir energía, de forma que si la batería de un módulo deja de funcionar por cualquier motivo, el resto de módulos comparten su energía, aumentando la robustez del organismo.…”