Key Technology Research Of An Inchworm-like Climbing Robot

With the fast development of modern construction and urban green construction,robots will have wider applications in the fields of agriculture,forestry and construction,etc.In these domains,a lot of assignments are required to be completed under high altitude condition.Consequently,workers have to face the problem of high-altitude dangerous work,harsh and complex environments,and labor-intensive,as well as long working hours.For a long time,how to develop a climbing robot to replace humans in high altitude work is a subject of researchers at home and abroad.In this paper,based on the inchworm biological bionic prototype,an inchworm-like climbing robot is developed;its structure design,kinematics and dynamics analysis,and trajectory planning are presented.For the structure design of inchworm-like climbing robot,firstly,the biological characteristics and climbing mechanism of inchworm are studied;the bone structure is abstracted and the gait is analyzed based on the principle of motion bionic.Afterwards,the structural design criterion is determined,the drive way is reasonably selected,and the concrete structures of the trunk and grab mechanism are designed in detail.Finally,the three-dimensional model of the robot is built by using the Pro/E software.For the inchworm-like climbing robot,the mechanism model is simplified,and on the basis,the global coordinate system,the local coordinate system and the generalized coordinate system are established.The forward and inverse kinematics is analyzed by screw theory,and the numerical solution of its inverse kinematics is solved by MATLAB program.Based on screw theory,the dynamic model of the robot is established through Lagrange method,and its numerical simulation and analysis is made by using MATLAB software.For the trajectory planning problem of the inchworm-like climbing robot,taking the transitional gait of the robot climbing between tree branches for example,the geometric path is determined and path point is expressed by joint angles based on the analysis of its gait.Then applying the 3-5-3 polynomial interpolation function to fit the motion trajectory,and setting the shortest time as the optimization goal,optimal analysis and emulation of transitional gaits of the robot climbing between tree branches is carried out by Quantum-behaved Particle Swarm Optimization.According to the planned joint space trajectory of the transitional gait between tree branches,the climbing simulation experiment is performed by using the virtual prototype technology.Dynamics and control model of the inchworm-like climbing robot are established by using ADAMS and Simulink software respectively,through their data interface module,achieving the co-simulation of the transitional gait between tree branches.Simulation results strongly show that the robot mechanism is feasible,the trajectory planning is reasonable.The related research and theoretical analysis of the inchworm-like climbing robot have a certain reference value for the application in the actual project.