Tree Climbing Robot

Tree Climbing Robot

Climbing robot is a challenging research topic that has gained much attention from researchers. Most of the robots reported in the literature are designed to climb on manmade structures, but seldom robots are designed for climbing natural environment such as trees. Trees and manmade structures are very different in nature. It brings different aspects of technical challenges to the robot design. In this book, you can find a collection of the cutting edge technologies in the field of tree-climbing robot and the ways that animals climb. It provides a valuable reference for robot designers to select appropriate climbing methods in designing tree-climbing robots for specific purposes. Based on the study, a novel bio-inspired tree-climbing robot with several breakthrough performances has been developed and presents in this book. It is capable of performing various actions that is impossible in the state-of-the-art tree-climbing robots, such as moving between trunk and branches. This book also proposes several approaches in autonomous tree-climbing, including the sensing methodology, cognition of the environment, path planning and motion planning on both known and unknown environment.

Design of a Bio-inspired, Dynamic Tree Climbing Robot

In recent years, researchers have developed a variety of bio-inspired robots that can climb surfaces ranging from brick and stucco to smooth glass. Instrumental in this development has been the utilization of specialized compliant foot structures. By attaching micro spines and directional dry adhesives to legs with hierarchical compliance levels, climbing on windows and walls has been made possible. In parallel with these developments in attachment mechanisms, recent work has been done to improve the speed and efficiency with which robots climb. Comparative studies of animals running up vertical surfaces have led to the development of reduced-order dynamic models of climbing. These models, or templates, give insight into how animals generate self-stabilizing force patterns, and have led to the development of a new class of dynamic climbing robots. The first and fastest of these climbers, DynoClimber, can climb at speeds up to 66 cm/s or 1.5 body lengths per second up a vertical, prepared surface. Although fast, these climbers are not yet able to scale real world surfaces such as buildings or trees. This paper describes initial work in developing a dynamic vertical climbing robot for climbing on bark.

Tree Climbing Robot (Gripper)