Multi-legged Robot for 3-dimensional Environments

—Adaptive Mechanism Using Flexible Body and Legs—

Abstract

Maintenance and inspection of old buildings, bridges, tunnels and so on are one of the important tasks of robots, and these robots are expected to be used for search and rescue missions in case of disasters. However, in such environment, it is difficult to operate robots autonomously because the surface of them are complex and unknown. In inspection tasks, many robots are expected to be simultaneously operated by a small number of operators, therefor lack of autonomy is a serious problem for practical use. To solve this problem, we focus on flexible mechanisms of bodies of creatures, and we propose two types of multi-legged robot. One is for climbing vertical walls and the other is for climbing vertical pipes. We developed prototype robots and conducted experiments. As a result, we confirmed that the developed robot can climb autonomously by utilizing the passive mechanisms.