A Tethered-Climbing Robot System for Lunar Terrain: Modeling and Analysis

A climbing robot for lunar caves and craters, called a tethered-climbing robot, is proposed. It consists of a robotic platform with a robotic arm which is suspended via tethers from multiple grippers. It achieves spatial climbing locomotion by relocating the grippers with the arm and by controlling the length of the tethers. In this paper, the kinematics and statics of a tethered-climbing robot are derived, and a method to calculate the workspace of the extendable arm is introduced. Furthermore, the gait and workspace of a generic tethered-climbing robot under lunar gravity are analyzed.