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Feasibility, planning and control of ground-wall transition for a suctorial hexapod robot

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Abstract

One of the key factors that affect the efficiency and scope of work of wall-climbing robots is how the climbing robot can achieve autonomous transition between adjacent vertical planes. This paper studies the problem of ground-wall transition of a self-developed suctorial wall-climbing hexapod robot (WelCH). In view of the feasibility of the robot performing transition, this paper makes a detailed analysis of the number and property of degrees of freedom (DOFs) of the body and the foot based on reciprocal screw theory, and the results show that the robot can achieve transitional motion only when its home configuration is axisymmetric rather than radially symmetric. For realizing the robot’s ground-wall transition, based on a Sinusoid-Sigmoid-Shaped (SS-Shaped) interpolation function, the motion strategies of foot transferring and body pitching are firstly designed in detail. This interpolation method can effectively avoid the wear of the suction cups by relying on fewer essential path points. Then, the saturation-truncated method and mean filtering method are used to deal with joint constraints and abrupt changes in angular velocities. Finally, a kinematic-based adaptive sliding mode control (ASMC) is adapted to track the planned smooth trajectory, which can effectively resist bounded external disturbances. The successful transitions from the horizontal ground to the vertical wall for the robot WelCH in simulation and filed experiment demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 61573148, 61603358), and the Science and Technology Planning Project of Guangdong Province, China (grant number 2015B010919007).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Automation Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, Guangdong, 510641, China

    Yong Gao, Wu Wei, Yanjie Li, Dongliang Wang & Qiuda Yu

  2. School of Automation, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, Hubei, 430074, China

    Xinmei Wang

  3. Hubei Key Laboratory of Advanced Control and Intelligent Automation for Complex Systems, Wuhan, Hubei, 430074, China

    Xinmei Wang

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  1. Yong Gao
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Correspondence to Wu Wei.

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Gao, Y., Wei, W., Wang, X. et al. Feasibility, planning and control of ground-wall transition for a suctorial hexapod robot. Appl Intell 51, 5506–5524 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-020-01955-2

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