Legged Robot Strategies for Climbing Stairs

This paper presents first an experimental platform developed for hexapod locomotion analysis and experiments climbing common types of obstacles. The platform contains two elements: a model of a six legged mobile robot used for real tests on different obstacle categories and a software simulator interface which allows study of the robot stability in gravitational field, assuring in the same time the control of the mobile robot during real experiments. For the hexapod robot this paper presents briefly the leg design and some constructive characteristics. The control part is a combination of Matlab, a micro-controller based development board and dedicated servomotor controller board. Secondly, this paper presents some strategies implemented for climbing stairs and experiments achieved on straight stairs and on spiral stairs. The locomotion sequences strategies for climbing stairs were designed in order to overcome them using the following two constraints: maintain the robot’s body parallel with respect to the ground and so, maintain the maximum height of the robot during locomotion.