KCG Lab

Part II: A climbing robot able to transverse generic trusses was designed and fabricated. We have designed and fabricated a caterpillar shaped robot having 8 degrees of freedom able to vertically advance through inchworm step, and Slinky step (that is a maneuver in which the second foot passes the leading foot). This way the robot may overcome a most of the typical obstacles available on trusses. As will be explained below in the case where the robot is unable the overcome an obstacle it we wish to endow it the ability to switch surfaces by using its rotational joint located at (both of) its distal end.

First Motion Planning scheme: We assumes the full geometric structure of the electric pole is known or alternatively the robot is human controlled: Thus our main challenge is to minimize the power needed for movement three algorithms were implemented:

1. The full configuration space is pre-computed. Then depending on the obstacle geometry the free configuration space is recomputed and the path planning problem is solved via a Dijkstra algorithm (i.e. finds path within a graph between two nodes with lowest edge weight sum).

   
   Obstacle avoidance (robot is covered to minimize noise)

2. A sampling based algorithm where we extend a tree data structure.
3. A rule path planning algorithm were the robot analyzes its configuration and finds a path for its end-effector in the work space, then the rule is 'stay close to the wall'.