Kinematic analysis and simulation of a hybrid biped climbing robot

This paper presents a novel climbing robot that explores 3-D truss structures for maintenance and inspection tasks. The robot is biped and has a hybrid serial-parallel architecture since each leg is composed of two parallel mechanisms connected in series. First, the forward kinematic problem of the complete robot is solved, obtaining the relative position and orientation between the feet in terms of the ten joint coordinates of the robot. The inverse kinematics is more complex due to the redundancy of the robot. Hence, a simplified inverse kinematic problem that assumes planar and symmetric movements is analyzed. Then, a tool to simulate the kinematics of the robot is presented, and it is used to demonstrate that the robot can completely explore 3-D structures, even when some movements are restricted to be planar and symmetric.