Abstract
Crawler type robots equipped with flipper arms are used as many rescue robots because they have high traverse ability. However, in the case where complex operations such as ascending or descending stairs are required, this type of robot has to control flipper arms at the same time, so that the operation is very difficult. In the previous work, our group tried the automation of ascending stairs, but the automation of descending stairs was not achieved. It needs for the automation of descending the stairs to recognize the shape of the stairs and the posture of the robot, and to control the flipper arms based on such recognized information. In this paper, we propose a method for automating the motion of descending the stairs, and verify the usefulness of the proposed techniques through some experiments.
