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Gibbon-inspired Robust Asymmetric Brachiation along an Upward Slope

  • Robot and Applications
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International Journal of Control, Automation and Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper investigates the robust control of an underactuated brachiating robot. The control schemes are motivated by the applications that require robots to move through lattice structures, such as the inspection and maintenance of power transmission lines and towers. Inspired by the pendulum-like movements that enable gibbons' arboreal locomotion, the controllers are designed to synchronize the brachiator with a virtual oscillator. Two controllers are proposed: a model-dependent feedback linearization scheme and a sliding-mode scheme that is independent of the system model. These controllers are tasked to drive a robotic brachiator in two cases with different geometries: symmetric geometry, where its links have equal lengths, and asymmetric geometry, where its links have different lengths. The numerical results illustrate that the proposed schemes are robust to the arbitrary initial conditions of the brachiator, the motor torque limitation at the elbow joint, as well as the geometry of the brachiator. Furthermore, they are able to perform successful fast swing-up and dynamic brachiating along a structural member with an upward slope in a unified control framework for both symmetric and asymmetric geometries.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Department of Mechanical Engineering, South Dakota State University, Brookings, USA

    Kim-Doang Nguyen

  2. The Centre for Autonomous Systems, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Dikai Liu

Authors
  1. Kim-Doang Nguyen
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  2. Dikai Liu
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Correspondence to Kim-Doang Nguyen.

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Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Recommended by Associate Editor Pilwon Hur under the direction of Editor Won-jong Kim. This work is supported in part by the FY20 Competitive Research Grant Program of South Dakota Board of Regents and by the climbing robot project funded by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO, Japan) and the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. The authors wish to acknowledge the support of the research team of this project.

Kim-Doang Nguyen received his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering at South Dakota State University, USA. His research interests include robotics, mechatronics, adaptive control, and time-delay systems.

Dikai Liu is a Professor of Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering at the Centre for Autonomous Systems, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. His research interests include robot perception, planning and control for mobile manipulators operating in complex environments such as steel bridges, physical human-robot interaction, multi-robot coordination, and bio-inspired robotics.

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Nguyen, KD., Liu, D. Gibbon-inspired Robust Asymmetric Brachiation along an Upward Slope. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 17, 2647–2654 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-018-0539-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-018-0539-2

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