A New Principle for Climbing Wheeled Robots: Serpentine Climbing with the Open WHEEL Platform

This paper describes an innovative principle for climbing obstacles with a two-axle and four-wheel robot with articulated frame. It is based on axle reconfiguration while ensuring permanent static stability. A simple example is demonstrated based on the OpenWHEEL platform with a serial mechanism connecting front and rear axles of the robot. A generic tridimensional multibody simulation is provided with Adams software. It permits to validate the concept and to get an approach of control laws for every type of inter-axle mechanism. This climbing principle permits to climb obstacles as high as the wheel while keeping energetic efficiency of wheel propulsion and using only one supplemental actuator. Applications to electric wheelchairs, quads and all terrain vehicles (ATV) are envisioned