Experimental Investigation on Flying Motion of Transverse Brachiation Robot

This paper presents design and implementation of a second generation of transverse ricochetal brachiation robot in the environments with ledges on the wall. To implement such unique hand-holding motion parallel to the wall, a gripper integrated with a quick-release mechanism was designed to provide sufficient clamping force and fast open-and-close gripper action during locomotion transitions. An optimization method was applied to obtain the desired tail reference trajectory for more efficient swing excitation. With the derived flying dynamic model, the flipping behavior of the robot was analyzed and a simple strategy of tail swing motion was proposed to adjust the flying posture and increase the chance of successful landing. The experiments on transverse ricochetal braichation demonstrate that the designed robot was able to finish a successful two-armed brachiation within an 8 cm gap distance.