Brachiation on a ladder with irregular intervals

Abstract

We have previously developed a brachiation controller that allows a two degree of freedom robot to swing from hand-hold to hand-hold on a horizontal ladder with evenly space rungs as well as swing up from a suspended posture using a "target dynamics" controller. In this paper, we extend this class of algorithms to handle the much more natural problem of locomotion over irregularly spaced hand-holds. Numerical simulations and laboratory experiments illustrate the effectiveness of this generalization.