Stair Climbing Robots and High-grip Crawler

Stair climbing is one of the most attractive performance of mobile robot for both legged and wheeled. (e.g. Stoeter et al., 2002; Murphy, 2000; Yim et al., 2000; Krishna et al., 1997; Granosik et al., 2005; Liu et al., 2005; Arai et al., 2006; Tanaka et al., 2006; Miyanaka et al., 2007; Tsukagoshi et al.,2005) Authors have been developing various kinds of stair climbers, considering how to make its climbing ability higher and its mechanical complexity reasonable and practical. The research includes realizing a large step negotiating height, controlling to keep its centre of gravity almost the centre of ground contacting area, higher speed of climbing up, large load tolerance to carry on. Reducing body weight and energy consumption is also the important matter of developing. In the first part of this chapter, we introduce some solutions to realize stair climbing machines that we developed. Each of them has good performance as in a category of their kind, e.g. various numbers of legged and wheeled shapes. Then, we discuss a development of high-grip crawler, which we think one of the best solutions as the stair climber.