Mechanical design of a tree gripper for miniature tree-climbing robots

In this paper, an novel tree gripping mechanism has been proposed for miniature tree-climbing robots. It is capable of attaching on a wide variety of trees with a wide range of gripping curvature. In addition, it is lightweight and simple in control. The gripper is simple in control as it is actuated by one actuator only. In addition, the omni-directional gripping ability also simplifies the use of the gripper as there is no extra actuator needed for orientation control. The special mechanism and optimized settings make the gripper able to attach on different sizes of tree tightly. The mechanism also allows zero energy consumption in static gripping. Numerous on-tree experiments of the proposed mechanism have been conducted and the results are satisfied.