SCALER: A Tough Versatile Quadruped Free-Climber Robot

Abstract

This paper introduces SCALER, a quadrupedal robot that demonstrates climbing on bouldering walls, overhangs, ceilings and trotting on the ground. SCALER is one of the first high-degrees of freedom four-limbed robots that can free-climb under the Earth's gravity and one of the most mechanically efficient quadrupeds on the ground. Where other state-of-the-art climbers specialize in climbing, SCALER promises practical free-climbing with payload and ground locomotion, which realizes true versatile mobility. A new climbing gait, SKATE gait, increases the payload by utilizing the SCALER body linkage mechanism. SCALER achieves a maximum normalized locomotion speed of 1.87 /s, or 0.56 m/s on the ground and 1.0 /min, or 0.35 m/min in bouldering wall climbing. Payload capacity reaches 233 % of the SCALER weight on the ground and 35 % on the vertical wall. Our GOAT gripper, a mechanically adaptable underactuated two-finger gripper, successfully grasps convex and non-convex objects and supports SCALER.

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

“…Among other things, the body should be kept close to the surface to reduce the stress on the gripping points. Robot SCALER [ 28 ] is a quadrupedal robot with four DOF per leg that demonstrates climbing on bouldering walls, overhangs, ceilings and trotting on the ground, while it is unable to climb flat surfaces due to the gripping system. Its legs are practically located in a plane to reduce the risk of overturning.…”

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

“…Los primeros generan comandos de velocidad para las articulaciones, mientras que los segundos producen pares. A pesar de que los IKC se siguen utilizando en robótica Tanaka et al (2022); Qiaoling et al (2019), los IDC son más recomendables para controlar robots con patas Kim et al (2019); Bellicoso et al (2016); Herzog et al (2016). Para el control de cada uno de los módulos de los robots como los propuestos en este artículo se pueden distinguir dos situaciones según el estado del módulo en particular: Cuando el módulo está adherido al entorno.…”

Learning Near-global-optimal Strategies for Hybrid Non-convex Model Predictive Control of Single Rigid Body Locomotion

“…We implement this controller on a quadruped robot designed and built by ourselves. The quadruped robot, named Spine Enhanced Climbing Autonomous Legged Exploration Robot (SCALER) [18], is a 18 DoF (12 joints + 6 rigid body DoF) position controlled robot for walking and wall-climbing. Each joint is actuated by a pair of dynamixel XM-430 servo motors which are designed for position control.…”