Study on mobile mechanism for a stair cleaning robot - Design of translational locomotion mechanism

An autonomous cleaning robot is proposed so as to move on all floors including stairs in a building. In human living environments, it is often the case that the cleaning area is three-dimensional space such as a high-rise building. However, many of cleaning robots cannot clean and move on stairs, because they are not considered to move on places between floors. The proposed cleaning robot is equipped with L-shaped legs on the both sides of the body frame of a rectangular solid. The robot climbs down stairs by rotating the body so that the top and bottom sides of it may be reversed using L-shaped legs. In this paper, a mobile mechanism and a control method are described for climbing down and translational movement on stairs.