A novel design of anti-falling mechanism for tree pruning robot

This paper presents a mechanism of a novel tree pruning robot that is designed to climb up a tree. The unique feature of the proposed design is the passive and active anti-falling mechanism. The passive anti-falling mechanism relies on the frictional forces to overcome the robot gravity force while the active anti-falling function uses the power provided by two steppers that is able to adjust the normal forces between the tire surfaces of the wheels and the tree trunk. The design of the pruning robot is modelled in SolidWorks and simulated using Simmechanics. The outcome of the simulation matches with the analysis result.