Abstract
Robots have been slowly replacing human workforce for heavy-duty and dangerous tasks. One of such tasks is pole climbing, which is energy-intensive and often associated with a high risk of falling. This paper describes the design, fabrication and testing of a pole climbing robot inspired by inchworm. The robot consists of a four-links spine structure with two grippers attached to both ends of the spine. This robot climbs a pole by a two-step rhythmic movement akin to the biological inchworm locomotion. The structure of the robot is designed using Solidworks 3D modelling software. The robot is actuated by five servo motors, which are controlled using an Arduino MEGA microcontroller. A series of experiment was performed to evaluate the pole climbing performance. From the experiments, the robot has successfully climbed up a 3.2 cm diameter pole autonomously, stopped at the highest point of the pole, and descended to its starting point. The robot recorded an average speed of 0.487 cm/s from 5 attempts of climbing a 180 cm height pole. Future testing will evaluate the performance of the robot in the presence of payload under different pole surface conditions.
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Acknowledgement
We would like to express our thanks to Universiti Sains Malaysia for supporting the work by RU Grant Scheme (Grant number: USM/PELECT/8014113).
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Mohaspa, A.M.B., Idris, N.F.B., Ern, E.S.Y., Othman, W.A.F.W., Din, A.S. (2022). Inchworm-Inspired Semi-autonomous Pole-Climbing Robot. In: Mahyuddin, N.M., Mat Noor, N.R., Mat Sakim, H.A. (eds) Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Robotics, Vision, Signal Processing and Power Applications. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 829. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8129-5_160
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8129-5_160
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