LIMBERO: A Limbed Climbing Exploration Robot Toward Traveling on Rocky Cliffs
This addresses the challenge of planetary exploration on rough terrain, offering a specific robotic solution for climbing steep cliffs, though it is incremental in advancing existing limbed robot designs.
The paper tackled the problem of enabling legged robots to climb steep, rocky surfaces by developing LIMBERO, a quadrupedal climbing robot with novel spine-type grippers, which demonstrated successful ascents under 1 G gravity with grippers achieving over 150 N grasping force.
In lunar and planetary exploration, legged robots have attracted significant attention as an alternative to conventional wheeled robots, which struggle to traverse rough and uneven terrain. To enable locomotion over highly irregular and steeply inclined surfaces, limbed climbing robots equipped with grippers on their feet have emerged as a promising solution. In this paper, we present LIMBERO, a 10 kg-class quadrupedal climbing robot that employs spine-type grippers for stable locomotion and climbing on rugged and steep terrain. We first introduce a novel gripper design featuring coupled finger-closing and spine-hooking motions, tightly actuated by a single motor, which achieves exceptional grasping performance (>150 N) despite its lightweight design (525 g). Furthermore, we develop an efficient algorithm to visualize a geometry-based graspability index on continuous rough terrain. Finally, we integrate these components into LIMBERO and demonstrate its ability to ascend steep rocky surfaces under a 1 G gravity condition, a performance not previously achieved yet for limbed climbing robots of this scale.