Clothbot_β: Dynamical Grasping and Climbing on Soft Cloth

Abstract

Robot climbing on soft flexible materials such as cloth is a challenging work. This in part due to the difficulty of the mechanism design and in part due to the lack of robustness of the control system. In this paper, a novel mechanism design and a new feedback control system are proposed to provide a constant grasping depth during climbing. In this version a light intensity sensor is added to detect the grasping depth and a two-steps strategy is used to dynamically adjust the grasping angle. This newly designed version of Clothbot called Clothbot_β has been verified by experiments to be of high success rate in climbing on soft flexible materials.