Optimizing the Maximum Torque of bioinspired climbing robots in static equilibrium

Inspired by insects and lizards, many biomimetic robots have been proposed in the literature to climb vertical surfaces. A common problem of these robots is minimizing the maximum torque at their joints to safely adhere to a vertical wall. This problem is non-linear and non-differentiable in nature, which requires the use of non-linear optimizers to find a solution. In this paper we propose to transform such a non-linear problem in a linear one using linear programming. We provide evidence that the proposed approach is efficient and fast when the non-linear problem is solved using other well-established methods, including Nelder-Mead, Pattern Search algorithm and Genetic Algorithms.