Legged climbing robot simulation platform created in MATLAB
ClimbLab: MATLAB Simulation Platform for Legged Climbing Robotics
Robotics
Summary
Climbing robots with legs need to be tested in different environments to see how well they move and grip walls or steep slopes. This paper presents a tool made in MATLAB that lets engineers design and simulate robots with legs moving in various environments. It can handle different gravity, ground stiffness, and slope angles, and can use detailed terrain data. The platform uses physics models to realistically simulate robot movements and interactions with surfaces.
What this means in practice
- •For roboticists: Simulate and test legged climbing robots in customizable environments using MATLAB before hardware deployment.
- •For game developers: Create realistic robot character motions on variable terrain types and slopes using a detailed physics engine.
Authors
Kentaro Uno, Warley F. R. Ribeiro, Yusuke Koizumi, Keigo Haji, Koki Kurihara, William Jones, Kazuya Yoshida
Abstract
This paper presents an open-sourced MATLAB simulation and analysis platform dedicated to legged climbing robots. This simulator enables the design of any limbed robotic system as an articulated multi-body with a floating base and simulates it walking and climbing in an arbitrary environment. The main variable environmental parameters are inclination, gravity, and ground stiffness, and any point cloud can be installed as the terrain map. Furthermore, the simulator employs a rigid body dynamics engine. This paper first describes the simulator structure, and the computational flow and next presents the representative simulation examples where quadrupedal robots assumed gripping on the wall or climbing on the steep slope.