A Spiny Claws Climbing Robot Based on Self-Sensing Soles

초록

Adaptive climbing on different surfaces is a great challenge for conventional robots due to a lack of self-sensing capabilities. Inspired by the exceptional sensing ability of feline soles, this study proposes a quadrupedal climbing robot based on self-sensing spiny-claw soles. First, a spiny-claw sole was designed by embedding stainless steel spines into a soft substrate. Next, a tensile strain sensor was designed based on carbon nanotubes and carbonyl iron powder through the squash method and then was integrated into the spiny-claw sole to fabricate the self-sensing sole. Then, a quadrupedal climbing robot was designed using four self-sensing spiny-claw soles. Subsequently, the control strategy of the self-sensing climbing robot was designed. Finally, the climbing performance of the self-sensing robot was experimentally tested. It is demonstrated that the robot can climb on different inclined surfaces with an angle of 0(degrees) to 75(degrees) and on three different rough surfaces. In addition, the maximum load of the robot is 175 g when climbing on a 45${<}^{>}\circ$ inclined surface. More importantly, the robot can detect whether there is an obstacle in the climbing path through the self-sensing soles and perform appropriate obstacle avoidance operations accordingly.

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