Tree Climbing Robot
A novel tree climbing robot “Treebot” has high maneuverability on an irregular tree environment and surpasses the state of the art tree climbing robots. Treebot’s body is a novel continuum maneuver structure that has high degrees of freedom and superior extension ability. Treebot also equips with a pair of omni-directional tree grippers that enable Treebot to adhere on a wide variety of trees with a wide range of gripping curvature. By combining these two novel designs, Treebot is able to reach many places on trees including branches. Treebot can maneuver on a complex tree environment, but only five actuators are used in the mechanism. As a result, Treebot can keep in compact size and lightweight. Although Treebot weighs only 600 grams, it has payload capability of 1.75 kg which is nearly three times of its own weight. On top of that, the special design of the gripper permits zero energy consumption in static gripping. Numerous experiments have been conducted on real trees. Experimental results reveal that Treebot has excellent climbing performance on a wide variety of trees.
11/ENG/431
Inventor(s): Professor Yangsheng XU, Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering Licensing Status: Available
香港
