Modeling and Optimal Control for Rope-Assisted Rappelling Maneuvers

Envisioning the employment of rope-assisted humanoid robots to reduce human intervention for operations in the heights, this preliminary work addresses the modeling and motion planning problems for a rope-assisted bipedal robot. The mathematical features of this system outnumber the ones of typical humanoid robots, including: under-actuation of the floating-base joints, the rope pulling effect and the passive connection between the robot body and the rope master-point. These characteristics render the study of a rope-assisted bipedal robot both fascinating and unexplored, raising motion planning challenges when attempting to plan dynamic suspended maneuvers, as rappelling. To this end, we first introduce a template three-mass model of a bipedal robot connected through passive joints to an extensible rope, which is in turn modeled as a two-mass body. Based on this, a family of optimal control problems is presented to plan rappelling maneuvers.