Robot climbs vertical surfaces by jumping with optimized shape and motion
Co-design of trajectory and morphology for a vertical jump-climbing robot
Robotics
Summary
Climbing robots usually move slowly and carefully to stay stuck to walls, making it hard for them to jump or move quickly like squirrels or bears. The authors built a lightweight robot that can jump up vertical surfaces by combining its shape and how it moves for a smooth jump and landing. Their robot uses its back leg as a sort of tail to turn itself around mid-air and land safely with its front grippers. This design lets the robot climb continuously at nearly two body lengths per second and also walk or jump onto vertical walls.
What this means in practice
- •For search and rescue teams: Deploy climbing robots capable of rapid vertical movement to access dangerous or hard-to-reach disaster areas faster.
- •For inspection service providers: Use robots that jump and climb on vertical infrastructures to perform inspections in tight or complex spaces.
Authors
Christopher Y. Xu, Elliot W. Hawkes
Abstract
Animals such as squirrels and even bears have adapted to rapidly climb up trees and other complex vertical terrain, but achieving comparable agility has been a challenge for climbing robots. Existing robots often use walking gaits and move conservatively to stay in contact with the surface, which limits the range of dynamic maneuvers. In this paper we present a 290 g robot that, to our knowledge, is the first to climb vertically by bounding (with an aerial phase). We leverage a co-design workflow, in which the morphology and trajectory are jointly optimized for fast locomotion, subject to adhesion force limitations seen in spined grippers. The resulting trajectory includes a rapid maneuver that launches the robot vertically, and an aerial reorientation that brings the front grippers back to the surface using the rear leg as an inertial tail. We evaluate the resulting jump forces in 2D force space and demonstrate that the optimized morphology is capable of continuous climbing at a speed of 0.375 m/s (1.97 body lengths/s), and can also achieve ground locomotion and transition to a vertical surface. Our work proposes design insights for the jump-climbing maneuver and serves as an important step toward creating climbing robots with agility on par with that of animals.