Abstract
The mobile robots which can walk around and perform several tasks over 3D terrain, a generalized terrain including the surface of wall and ceiling of large constructions are highly demanded. We discuss the control of the leg motion of quadruped-wall-climbing-robot specifically designed for 3D terrain from the view point of two design and control concepts which we have already proposed, the GDA, or gravitationally decoupled actuation, and Coupled Drive. The GDA was introduced to eliminate negative power consumption and improve energy efficiency in ground walking, and the Coupled Drive was introduced to evenly distribute power generation among installed actuators, decrease the weight of the actuation mechanism, and enable powerful walking in wall climbing motion. In this article we propose a new control method to adaptively select walking postures in both ground walk and wall climbing and optimize the walking performances in terms of the concepts of GDA and Coupled Drive. We made simulation experiments considering actual actuation characteristics, standing motion constraint and other boundary conditions and shows that the introduced control improve walking performance in 3D terrain well.
