Planning and control of stable ladder climbing motion for the four-limbed Robot “WAREC-1”

This paper describes an approach that enables the four-limbed robot “WAREC-1” to climb up and down vertical ladders stably. First, the four-limbed robot “WAREC-1” is introduced and dynamic stability conditions in multi-mass model for ladder climbing are proposed as the basis of judging whether a four-limbed robot is stable or not while climbing a vertical ladder. According to the proposed stability conditions, 3 different types of moment will directly affect the stability of the robot on a ladder: gravitational moment, inertial moment and reaction force moment. With the analysis of these 3 kinds of moments and the relationship among them, stability control methods are proposed to maintain stability of the robot on a ladder to the greatest degree and avoid their mutual interference. Combining with the stability conditions and stability control proposed, stable motion planning of climbing up and down a vertical ladder, a motion planning method proposed by the authors that allows independent path and time planning in trajectory planning is also applied to reinforce the efficiency of the stability control. Eventually, results from the simulation and physical robot verify the validity of the proposed control methods.