Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : May 27, 2020 - May 30, 2020
A steep cliff wall is one of the extreme terrains and inaccessible for conventional mobile robots. To cope with such a difficult terrain, multi-limbed free-climbing robots have been studied. However, development of an adaptive robot gripper to terrain roughness with mechanical efficiency still remain to be realized. In related works, although a spine-type multi-fingered gripper has been validated for robotic free-climbing, the previous grippers are oversized, hyper-redundant, and non-durable systems. This study proposes a tracing grip such that minimum fingers can achieve more adaptive spine-type gripping to the terrain surface. The tracing motion enables to guide the spine to a suitable point on the rough surface to be gripped or hooked. The developed gripper was validated through the gripping experiments using simulated terrains.The gripping performance of the gripper is quantitatively evaluated, and the effectiveness of the tracing grip is also shown.
