Walk-to-brachiate transfer of multi-locomotion robot with error recovery

Abstract

This paper describes walk-to-brachiate transfer of a multi-locomotion robot (MLR). The MLR has multiple types of locomotion such as biped walking, quadruped walking and brachiation. This transfer is carried out through vertical ladder climbing as the robot must raise its body to start brachiating. As a result we have designed two stable transfer motions from walk to climb and from climb to brachiate, while contact situations and constraints of the robot are changing during the transfers. In addition, we have proposed a control algorithm by considering the reaction force from environment, and the setting of parameter is based on a kinetic model of the robot in order to tolerate relative position errors between the robot and its environments such as rungs of the ladder. The robustness of the designed motions with error corrections is experimentally verified.