Design and Implementation of a Shape Shifting Rolling–Crawling–Wall-Climbing Robot

Bio-inspired design of hard-bodied mobile robots based on arthropod morphologies: a 10 year systematic review and bibliometric analysis

This research presents a 10-year systematic review based on bibliometric analysis of the bio-inspired design of hard-bodied mobile robot mechatronic systems considering the anatomy of arthropods. These are the most diverse group of animals whose flexible biomechanics and adaptable morphology, thus, it can inspire robot development. Papers were reviewed from two international databases (Scopus and Web of Science) and one platform (Aerospace Research Central), then they were classified according to: Year of publication (January 2013 to April 2023), arthropod group, published journal, conference proceedings, editorial publisher, research teams, robot classification according to the name of arthropod, limb's locomotion support, number of legs/arms, number of legs/body segments, limb's degrees of freedom, mechanical actuation type, modular system, and environment adaptation. During the screening, more than 33 000 works were analyzed. Finally, a total of 174 studies (90 journal-type, 84 conference-type) were selected for in-depth study: Insecta-hexapods (53.8%), Arachnida-octopods (20.7%), Crustacea-decapods (16.1%), and Myriapoda-centipedes and millipedes (9.2%). The study reveals that the most active editorials are the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., Springer, MDPI, and Elsevier, while the most influential researchers are located in the USA, China, Singapore, and Japan. Most works pertained to spiders, crabs, caterpillars, cockroaches, and centipedes. We conclude that 'arthrobotics' research, which merges arthropods and robotics, is constantly growing and includes a high number of relevant studies with findings that can inspire new methods to design biomechatronic systems.

Advances in Climbing Robots for Vertical Structures in the Past Decade: A Review

Climbing robots are designed to conduct tasks that may be dangerous for humans working at height. In addition to improving safety, they can also increase task efficiency and reduce labor costs. They are widely used for bridge inspection, high-rise building cleaning, fruit picking, high-altitude rescue, and military reconnaissance. In addition to climbing, these robots need to carry tools to complete their tasks. Hence, their design and development are more challenging than those of most other robots. This paper analyzes and compares the past decade's design and development of climbing robots that can ascend vertical structures such as rods, cables, walls, and trees. Firstly, the main research fields and basic design requirements of climbing robots are introduced, and then the advantages and disadvantages of six key technologies are summarized, namely, conceptual design, adhesion methods, locomotion modes, safety mechanisms, control methods, and operational tools. Finally, the remaining challenges in research on climbing robots are briefly discussed and future research directions are highlighted. This paper provides a scientific reference for researchers engaged in the study of climbing robots.

Object-of-Interest Perception in a Reconfigurable Rolling-Crawling Robot

Cebrenus Rechenburgi, a member of the huntsman spider family have inspired researchers to adopt different locomotion modes in reconfigurable robotic development. Object-of-interest perception is crucial for such a robot to provide fundamental information on the traversed pathways and guide its locomotion mode transformation. Therefore, we present a object-of-interest perception in a reconfigurable rolling-crawling robot and identifying appropriate locomotion modes. We demonstrate it in Scorpio, our in-house developed robot with two locomotion modes: rolling and crawling. We train the locomotion mode recognition framework, named Pyramid Scene Parsing Network (PSPNet), with a self-collected dataset composed of two categories paths, unobstructed paths (e.g., floor) for rolling and obstructed paths (e.g., with person, railing, stairs, static objects and wall) for crawling, respectively. The efficiency of the proposed framework has been validated with evaluation metrics in offline and real-time field trial tests. The experiment results show that the trained model can achieve an mIOU score of 72.28 and 70.63 in offline and online testing, respectively for both environments. The proposed framework's performance is compared with semantic framework (HRNet and Deeplabv3) where the proposed framework outperforms in terms of mIOU and speed. Furthermore, the experimental results has revealed that the robot's maneuverability is stable, and the proposed framework can successfully determine the appropriate locomotion modes with enhanced accuracy during complex pathways.

A low-cost single-motor-driven climbing robot based on overrunning spring clutch mechanisms

Forestry monitoring and high-voltage cable inspection demand on low-cost climbing robots. The proposed climbing robot has simple control and low cost, enabling loaded, which drives by a single motor. Based on the overrunning spring clutch mechanisms, two motions of holding and climbing are realized by one motor. A rope-driven gripper is for adaptive enveloping holding effectively and a thron wheel is used to attach the climbing surface and stable climbing. The design parameters of the overrunning spring clutch mechanism and the rope-driven gripper are determined. The prototype and experiment setup are built. The enveloping holding experiment is carried out to verify the holding stability and shape adaptability of the rope-driven gripper. The trunk and pipe climbing experiments verify the climbing performance of the climbing robot and its application prospects with a certain load. In the future, as a low-cost climbing robot, a camera or operating mechanism can be equipped for tasks.

sTetro-Deep Learning Powered Staircase Cleaning and Maintenance Reconfigurable Robot

Staircase cleaning is a crucial and time-consuming task for maintenance of multistory apartments and commercial buildings. There are many commercially available autonomous cleaning robots in the market for building maintenance, but few of them are designed for staircase cleaning. A key challenge for automating staircase cleaning robots involves the design of Environmental Perception Systems (EPS), which assist the robot in determining and navigating staircases. This system also recognizes obstacles and debris for safe navigation and efficient cleaning while climbing the staircase. This work proposes an operational framework leveraging the vision based EPS for the modular re-configurable maintenance robot, called sTetro. The proposed system uses an SSD MobileNet real-time object detection model to recognize staircases, obstacles and debris. Furthermore, the model filters out false detection of staircases by fusion of depth information through the use of a MobileNet and SVM. The system uses a contour detection algorithm to localize the first step of the staircase and depth clustering scheme for obstacle and debris localization. The framework has been deployed on the sTetro robot using the Jetson Nano hardware from NVIDIA and tested with multistory staircases. The experimental results show that the entire framework takes an average of 310 ms to run and achieves an accuracy of 94.32% for staircase recognition tasks and 93.81% accuracy for obstacle and debris detection tasks during real operation of the robot.

Design of a wheeled wall climbing robot based on the performance of bio-inspired dry adhesive material

Inspired by gecko’s adhesive feet, a wheeled wall climbing robot is designed in this paper with the synchronized gears and belt system acting as the wheels by considering both motion efficiency and adhesive capability. Adhesion of wheels is obtained by the bio-inspired adhesive material wrapping on the outer surface of wheels. A ducted fan mounted on the back of the robot supplies thrust force for the adhesive material to generate normal and shear adhesion force whilemoving on vertical surfaces. Experimental verification of robot climbing on vertical flat surface was carried out. The stability and the effect of structure design parameters were analyzed.

Collision Avoidance and Stability Study of a Self-Reconfigurable Drainage Robot

The inspection and maintenance of drains with varying heights necessitates a drain mapping robot with trained labour to maintain community hygiene and prevent the spread of diseases. For adapting to level changes and navigating in the narrow confined environments of drains, we developed a self-configurable hybrid robot, named Tarantula-II. The platform is a quadruped robot with hybrid locomotion and the ability to reconfigure to achieve variable height and width. It has four legs, and each leg is made of linear actuators and modular rolling wheel mechanisms with bi-directional movement. The platform has a fuzzy logic system for collision avoidance of the side wall in the drain environment. During level shifting, the platform achieves stability by using the pitch angle as the feedback from the inertial measuring unit (IMU) mounted on the platform. This feedback helps to adjust the accurate height of the platform. In this paper, we describe the detailed mechanical design and system architecture, kinematic models, control architecture, and stability of the platform. We deployed the platform both in a lab setting and in a real-time drain environment to demonstrate the wall collision avoidance, stability, and level shifting capabilities of the platform.

Optimization Design and Flexible Detection Method of Wall-Climbing Robot System with Multiple Sensors Integration for Magnetic Particle Testing

Weld detection is vital to the quality of ship construction and navigation safety, and numerous detection robots have been developed and widely applied. Focusing on the current bottleneck of robot safety, efficiency, and intelligent detection, this paper developed a wall-climbing robot that integrates multiple sensors and uses fluorescent magnetic powder for nondestructive testing. We designed a moving mechanism that can safely move on a curved surface and a serial-parallel hybrid flexible detection mechanism that incorporates a force sensor to solve the robot’s safe adsorption and a flexible detection of the curved surface to complete the flaw detection operation. We optimized the system structure and improved the overall performance of the robot by establishing a unified mechanical model for different operating conditions. Based on the collected sensor information, a multi-degree of freedom component collaborative flexible detection method with a standard detecting process was developed to complete efficient, high-quality detection. Results showed that the developed wall-climbing robot can move safely and steadily on the complex facade and can complete the flaw detection of wall welds.

A Path Tracking Strategy for Car Like Robots with Sensor Unpredictability and Measurement Errors

This work is inspired by motion control of cleaning robots, operating in certain endogenous environments, and performing various tasks like door cleaning, wall sanitizing, etc. The base platform's motion for these robots is generally similar to the motion of four-wheel cars. Most of the cleaning and maintenance tasks require detection, path planning, and control. The motion controller's job is to ensure the robot follows the desired path or a set of points, pre-decided by the path planner. This control loop generally requires some feedback from the on-board sensors, and odometry modules, to compute the necessary velocity inputs for the wheels. As the sensors and odometry modules are prone to environmental noise, dead-reckoning errors, and calibration errors, the control input may not provide satisfactory performance in a closed-loop. This paper develops a robust-observer based sliding mode controller to fulfill the motion control task in the presence of incomplete state measurements and sensor inaccuracies. A robust intrinsic observer design is proposed to estimate the input matrix, which is used for dynamic feedback linearization. The resulting uncertain dynamics are then stabilized through a sliding mode controller. The proposed robust-observer based sliding mode technique assures asymptotic trajectory tracking in the presence of measurement uncertainties. Lyapunov based stability analysis is used to guarantee the convergence of the closed-loop system, and the proposed strategy is successfully validated through numerical simulations.

Implementation of a Reconfigurable Robot to Achieve Multimodal Locomotion Based on Three Rules of Configuration

In this paper, we focus on the configuration design of a reconfigurable robot that merges the functions of wheels, tracks, and legs together. A deformable rim is utilized to make the robot wheel reconfigurable to change its locomotion mode. Three rules of configuration design to achieve reconfiguration between different modes are proposed: (1) in wheel mode, the track wheel set should be hidden inside the wheel rim; (2) in track/leg mode, the folded wheel rim should be hidden inside the caterpillar loop; (3) the circumference of the wheel rim in wheel mode should be equal to the length of the track ring in track mode. According to these rules, the configuration of the deformable rim, track wheel set, and telescopic spoke are analyzed and designed. A prototype of the reconfigurable wheel is fabricated by three-dimensional printing, and its functions of locomotion in different modes, the switch between different modes, and its load-bearing ability are tested, verifying the effectiveness of the configuration design. Furthermore, a prototype of the reconfigurable robot is manufactured by computerized numerical control (CNC) machining to verify the structural design of the reconfigurable wheel. Compared to traditional hybrid robots with separate wheels, tracks, and legs, this reconfigurable design lends the multimodal robot both excellent terrain adaptability and a compact structure; thus, it can be widely used as a universal mobile platform in search and rescue missions and explosive object disposal missions.

A System-of-Systems Bio-Inspired Design Process: Conceptual Design and Physical Prototype of a Reconfigurable Robot Capable of Multi-Modal Locomotion

Modern engineering problems require solutions with multiple functionalities in order to meet their practical needs to handle a variety of applications in different scenarios. Conventional design paradigms for single design purpose may not be able to satisfy this requirement efficiently. This paper proposes a novel system-of-systems bio-inspired design method framed in a solution-driven bio-inspired design paradigm. The whole design process consists of eight steps, that is, (1) biological solutions identification, (2) biological solutions definition/champion biological solutions, (3) principle extraction from each champion biological solution, (4) merging of extracted principles, (5) solution reframing, (6) problem search, (7) problem definition, and (8) principles application & implementation. The steps are elaborated and a case study of reconfigurable robots is presented following these eight steps. The design originates from the multimodal locomotion capabilities of two species (i.e., spiders and primates) and is analyzed based on the Pugh analysis. The resulting robotic platform could be potentially used for urban patrolling purposes.

Research on motion characteristics of space truss-crawling robot

For the future demands of unmanned assembly of orbital space truss structures, a new space truss-crawling robot based on biomimetic principles is proposed. The robot system mainly consists of multi-joint legs and an adhesive microstructure imitating a gecko. The kinematics analysis of a single leg and the system design are accomplished based on functional requirements and adaptivity analysis. The motion simulation model of the robot and the discrete element simulation model of the adhesion microstructure are established based upon this analysis. The simulation of the holding motion of a single leg is implemented based on the EDEM-ADAMS platform, and the feasibility of the scheme is demonstrated by analyzing the influence of adhesive microstructures comparatively. The related motion characteristics of the robot while crawling are obtained by co-simulation, and the influence law analysis is carried out by analyzing the interaction between not only the crawling infrastructure but also the crawling gait and motion characteristics. A crawling experiment in a simulated low-gravity environment is conducted to further verify the robot’s movement function, which will provide beneficial reference for practical applications of the robot in the future.

The Dynamic Coupling Analysis for All-Wheel-Drive Climbing Robot Based on Safety Recovery Mechanism Model

Cable is one of the most important parts on cable-stayed bridges. Its safety is very important. The aim of this study is to design an all-wheel-drive climbing robot based on safety recovery mechanism model for automatic inspection of bridge cables. For this purpose, a model of a three-wheel-drive climbing robot with high-altitude safety recovery mechanism is constructed and the basic performances such as climbing ability and anti-skidding properties are analyzed. Secondly, by employing the finite element method, natural frequency of the robot is calculated and that of a cable with concentrated masses is obtained through use of the Rayleigh quotient. Based on the mentioned quantities, the dynamic characteristics of the robot–cable system are further analyzed. In order to verify the climbing ability of the designed robot, a prototype of the robot is made, a robot testing platform is established and the climbing & loading experiments of the robot are carried out. The experiment results illustrated that the robot can carry a payload of 10 kg and safely return along the cable under the influences of inertial force.