Modeling and development of a tool to aid in the design of tracked mobile climbing robots on curved surfaces

Mobile climbing robots have been in use for remote surveillance, manufacturing and other applications over the past years to make these tasks safer and more efficient for human operators. Mobile robot systems have received significant attention in the research literature and the behavior of tracked climbing robots on planar surfaces is well established. The tasks of these mobile robots however are highly dependent on the geometric properties of the traversing surfaces. A method for kinematic modeling of tracked mobile climbing robots on non-planar surfaces is presented. The kinematic behavior of a mobile climbing robot on a particular set of non-planar surfaces is studied and a model is presented to obtain the design parameters for a tracked climbing robot. The model is developed based on a track-based Skid Steer Mobile Robot (SMMR) consisting of two tracks and a single chassis without predefined kinematic connections. The relative pitch, yaw and roll of the tracks constitute a set of design parameters that are computed to form the basis of the design of the kinematic configuration between the tracks and chassis. The range of design parameters are calculated to infer the allowable degree of freedom between the bodies and are tabulated for a subset of surfaces.