Transition Motion from Ladder Climbing to Brachiation with Optimal Load-Allocation Control

Abstract

Abstract This paper describes the transition motion from ladder climbing to brachiation for a multi-locomotion robot (MLR). The MLR has versatile modes of locomotion, such as biped walking, quadruped walking, brachiation and ladder climbing. The transition is a challenging motion, because the environmental boundaries change and the robot has to switch the form of its locomotion depending on its surroundings, situations and purposes. The robot supports itself with three end-effectors that maintain its stability, while one hand transfers from a rung on the vertical ladder to a new rung behind the robot for brachiation. A closed kinematic chain is formed by the robot links and the ladder. In this case, if the number of position-controlled active joints is greater than the number of the chain’s degrees of freedom, an internal stress appears because of unavoidable position errors. The huge internal stress may lead some motors to become overloaded. Since the safety of each motor is very important for a serial-link robot, a load-allocation algorithm is proposed to balance the loads of the joint motors. The algorithm is verified through experiments.