Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-12T01:25:42.598Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Autonomous Stairwell Ascent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2019

B. Deniz Ilhan ,
Aaron M. Johnson  and
D. E. Koditschek
B. Deniz Ilhan*
Affiliation:
Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Aaron M. Johnson
Affiliation:
Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
D. E. Koditschek
Affiliation:
Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Summary

This paper documents autonomous multi-floor stairwell ascent by a legged robot. This is made possible through empirically deployed sequential composition of several reactive controllers, with perceptually triggered transitions. This composition relies on simplified assumptions regarding the robot’s sensory capabilities, its level of mobility, and the environment it operates in. The discrepancies between these assumptions and the physical reality are capably handled by the intrinsic motor competence of the robot. This behavior is implemented on the legged RHex platform and experiments spanning 10 different stairwells with various challenges are conducted.

Keywords

Autonomous robotStair climbingSequential compositionSelf-manipulation
Type
Articles
Information
Robotica , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 159 - 170
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Johnson, A. M., Hale, M. T., Haynes, G. C. and Koditschek, D. E., “Autonomous legged hill and stairwell ascent,” In: IEEE International Workshop on Safety, Security, & Rescue Robotics, SSRR (2011) pp. 134–142.Google Scholar
Ilhan, B. D., Johnson, A. M. and Koditschek, D. E., “Autonomous legged hill ascent,” J. Field Robot.35(5), 802–832 (2018).10.1002/rob.21779CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, I. E. and Loeb, G. E., A Reductionist Approach to Creating and Using Neuromusculoskeletal Models (Springer, New York, USA, 2000) p. 148.Google Scholar
Holmes, P., Full, R. J., Koditschek, D. E. and Guckenheimer, J., “The dynamics of legged locomotion: Models, analyses, and challenges,” SIAM Rev. 48(2), 207–304 (2006).10.1137/S0036144504445133CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burridge, R. R., Rizzi, A. A. and Koditschek, D. E., “Sequential composition of dynamically dexterous robot behaviors,” Int. J. Robot. Res. 18(6), 534–555 (1999).10.1177/02783649922066385CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galloway, K. C., Haynes, G. C., Ilhan, B. D., Johnson, A. M., Knopf, R., Lynch, G., Plotnick, B., White, M. and Koditschek, D. E., “X-RHex: A Highly Mobile Hexapedal Robot for senzsorimotor Tasks,” Technical Report (University of Pennsylvania, 2010).Google Scholar
Haynes, G. C., Pusey, J., Knopf, R., Johnson, A. M. and Koditschek, D. E., “Laboratory on legs: an architecture for adjustable morphology with legged robots,” In: Unmanned Systems Technology XIV, vol. 8387(SPIE, 2012) p. 83870W.Google Scholar
Saranli, U., Buehler, M. and Koditschek, D. E., “RHex: A simple and highly mobile hexapod robot,” Int. J. Robot. Res. 20(7), 616–631 (2001).Google Scholar
Moore, E., Campbell, D., Grimminger, F. and Buehler, M., “Reliable Stair Climbing in the Simple Hexapod ‘RHex’” In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2002. Proceedings, ICRA’02. vol. 3 (IEEE, 2002) pp. 2222–2227.Google Scholar
Birk, A. and Carpin, S., “Rescue robotics – a crucial milestone on the road to autonomous systems,” Adv. Robot. 20(5), 595–605 (2006).10.1163/156855306776985577CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ray, R., Bepari, B. and Bhaumik, S., “On design and development of an intelligent mobile robotic vehicle for stair-case navigation,” In: Intelligent Autonomous Systems (Pratihar, D. and Jain, L., eds.), vol. 275 (Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg, 2010) pp. 87–122.10.1007/978-3-642-11676-6_5CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murphy, R. R., Tadokoro, S., Nardi, D., Jacoff, A., Fiorini, P., Choset, H. and Erkmen, A. M., “Search and rescue robotics,” In: Springer Handbook of Robotics (Siciliano, B. and Khatib, O., eds.) (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008) pp. 1151–1173.10.1007/978-3-540-30301-5_51CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Xiong, Y. and Matthies, L., “Vision-Guided Autonomous Stair Climbing,” In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA’00, vol. 2 (IEEE, 2000) pp. 1842–1847.Google Scholar
Steplight, S., Engal, G., Jung, S.-H., Walker, D. B., Taylor, C. J. and Ostrowski, J. P., “A Mode-Based Sensor Fusion Approach to Robotic Stair-Climbing,” In: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (2000) pp. 1113–1118.Google Scholar
Ben-Tzvi, P., Ito, S. and Goldenberg, A. A., “A mobile robot with autonomous climbing and descending of stairs,” Robotica 27(2), 171–188 (2009).10.1017/S0263574708004426CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luo, R. C., Hsiao, M. and Lin, T.-W., “Erect Wheel-Legged Stair Climbing Robot for Indoor Service Applications,” In: 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), IEEE (2013) pp. 2731–2736.Google Scholar
Morales, R., Somolinos, J. and Cerrada, J., “Dynamic control of a reconfigurable stair-climbing mobility system,” Robotica 31(2), 295–310 (2013).10.1017/S0263574712000276CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turlapati, S. H., Shah, M., Teja, S. P., Siravuru, A. and Shah, S. V., “Stair Climbing using a Compliant Modular Robot,” In: 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), IEEE (2015) pp. 3332–3339.10.1109/IROS.2015.7353841CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morozovsky, N. and Bewley, T., “Stair climbing via successive perching,” IEEE/ASME Trans. Mechatron. 20(6), 2973–2982 (2015).10.1109/TMECH.2015.2426722CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Topping, T. T., Kenneally, G. and Koditschek, D. E., “Quasi-Static and Dynamic Mismatch for Door Opening and Stair Climbing with a Legged Robot,” In: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), IEEE (2017) pp. 1080–1087.10.1109/ICRA.2017.7989130CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guo, J., Shi, J., Zhu, W. and Wang, J., “Approach to Autonomous Stair Climbing for Tracked Robot,” In: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Unmanned Systems (ICUS), IEEE (2017) pp. 182–186.10.1109/ICUS.2017.8278337CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caron, S., Kheddar, A. and Tempier, O., “Stair climbing stabilization of the HRP-4 humanoid robot using whole-body admittance control,” In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, IEEE (2019)Google Scholar
Sasaki, K. and Suzuki, K., “Active rotary-legs mechanism for stair-climbing mobility vehicle,” IEEE Robot. Automat. Lett. 3, 2237–2244 (2018).10.1109/LRA.2018.2812224CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Se, S. and Brady, M., “Vision-Based Detection of Staircases,” In: Fourth Asian Conference on Computer Vision ACCV, vol. 1 (2000) pp. 535–540.Google Scholar
Delmerico, J. A., Baran, D., David, P., Ryde, J. and Corso, J. J., “Ascending Stairway Modeling from Dense Depth Imagery for traversability Analysis,” In: 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (May 2013) pp. 2283–2290.10.1109/ICRA.2013.6630886CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sinha, A., Papadakis, P. and Elara, M. R., “A Staircase Detection Method for 3D Point Clouds,” In: 2014 13th International Conference on Control Automation Robotics & Vision (ICARCV), IEEE (2014) pp. 652–656.10.1109/ICARCV.2014.7064381CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wenger, G. J., Johnson, A. M., Taylor, C. J. and Koditschek, D. E., “Semi-Autonomous Exploration of Multi-Floor Buildings with a Legged Robot,” In: Unmanned Systems Technology XVII, vol. 9468 (Baltimore, MD: SPIE, 2015) pp. 94 680B–8.Google Scholar
Westfechtel, T., Ohno, K., Mertsching, B., Nickchen, D., Kojima, S. and Tadokoro, S., “3d Graph Based Stairway Detection and Localization for Mobile Robots,” In: 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), IEEE (2016) pp. 473–479.10.1109/IROS.2016.7759096CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perez-Yus, A., Gutiérrez-Gómez, D., Lopez-Nicolas, G. and Guerrero, J., “Stairs detection with odometry-aided traversal from a wearable RGB-D camera,” Comput. Vis. Image Und. 154, 192–205 (2017).10.1016/j.cviu.2016.04.007CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ciobanu, A., Morar, A., Moldoveanu, F., Petrescu, L., Ferche, O. and Moldoveanu, A., “Real-time indoor staircase detection on mobile devices,” In: 2017 21st International Conference on Control Systems and Computer Science (CSCS), IEEE (2017) pp. 287–293.10.1109/CSCS.2017.46CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haynes, G. C. and Rizzi, A. A., “Gaits and gait transitions for legged robots,” In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Orlando, FL, USA (May 2006) pp. 1117–1122.Google Scholar
Full, R. and Koditschek, D., “Templates and anchors: neuromechanical hypotheses of legged locomotion on land,” J. Exp. Biol. 202, 3325–3332 (1999).10.1242/jeb.202.23.3325CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sayginer, E., Akbey, T., Yazicioglu, Y. and Saranl, A., “Task oriented kinematic analysis for a legged robot with half-circular leg morphology,” In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (May 2009) pp. 4088–4093.Google Scholar
Johnson, A. M. and Koditschek, D. E., “Legged self-manipulation,” IEEE Access, 1, 310–334 (May 2013).10.1109/ACCESS.2013.2263192CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lozano-Perez, T., Mason, M. T. and Taylor, R. H., “Automatic synthesis of fine-motion strategies for robots,” Int. J. Robot. Res. 3(1), 3–24 (1984).10.1177/027836498400300101CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, A. M., Haynes, G. C. and Koditschek, D. E., “Disturbance Detection, Identification, and Recovery by Gait Transition in Legged Robots,” In: Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Taipei, Taiwan (October 2010).Google Scholar
Hesch, J., Mariottini, G. and Roumeliotis, S., “Descending-Stair Detection, Approach, and Traversal with an Autonomous Tracked Vehicle,” In: 2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), (October 2010) pp. 5525–5531.Google Scholar
Campbell, D. and Buehler, M., “Stair descent in the simple hexapod RHex,” In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2003. Proceedings of ICRA’03., vol. 1 IEEE (2003) pp. 1380–1385.Google Scholar
Kalantari, A., Mihankhah, E. and Moosavian, S., “Safe Autonomous Stair Climbing for a Tracked Mobile Robot Using a Kinematics Based Controller,” In: IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics, AIM 2009, IEEE (2009) pp. 1891–1896.10.1109/AIM.2009.5229765CrossRefGoogle Scholar