Motion Planning for Autonomous Climbing Stairs for Flipper Robot

This paper presents a new control strategy for track-flipper robot autonomous climbing stairs within indoor environment. Different from remote control operation, autonomous obstacle crossing of robot requires more complex motion planning, including feasibility analysis, attitude optimization and stability control. In order to analyze the obstacle-crossing capability of the robot, the kinematics modeling of the track-flipper robot is carried out, including the maximum height of climbing a single step and the capability to climb the stairs. On this basis, the motion planning of the robot for individual steps and stairs of different heights had been completed. Experiments on the robot’s self-climbing steps and stairs were also carried out, which verified the feasibility and rationality of the robot’s obstacle-crossing capability, obstacle-crossing stability and motion planning.