Stable Stair Climbing in a Simple Hexapod Robot

Abstract

RHex is a hexapod robot with compliant legs and only six actuated degrees of freedom. Its ability to traverse highly fractured and unstable terrain has already been documented. In this paper, we describe open loop controllers for our small robot to climb and descend regular stairs. The reliability is 90% (9/10) for climbing and 100% (10/10) for descending, based on ten successive trials. Specific resistance, a measure of energy efficiency, during stair climbing is 10.9, and 4.5 during descent.