Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : June 01, 2022 - June 04, 2022
In recent years, skylights, which are vertical holes thought to be the entrances to lava tubes, have been discovered on the lunar surface. Although the robotic exploration inside there is essential for the deep understanding of the lunar geological history, however, conventional wheeled mobile robots are unable to traverse such steep and rocky terrain. For this challenge, We have developed a quadrupedal climbing robot with spine-type grippers that is able to hold such terrain and experimentally demonstrated autonomous operation in a known simulated environment. In order to achieve the autonomous operation in an unknown environment, the robot is required to grip the target rock by its gripper reliably. In this paper, we developed a gripper with a built-in force/torque sensor and IMU and investigated the gripping performance against the different directions of the external force. Based on that, we architect the secure gripping sequence.
