Hierarchical motion planning of a biped climbing robot in three-dimensional truss structures.

Climbing robots must be capable of autonomously navigating three-dimensional truss -like structures to prevent human operators from being exposed to significant physical risks when performing maintenance tasks in such environments. This article presents a hierarchical motion planning algorithm for biped climbing robots. Unlike other conventional techniques, our algorithm decomposes the global three-dimensional problem into multiple sub -problems, each one dedicated to managing specific aspects of the process of generating the sequence of footholds. Initially, the global route is planned, which includes the sequence of faces to be traversed to reach the designated point, identifying which transition points will be used for changing from one face to another in the sequence. Subsequently, the path that the robot must follow along each of the faces comprising the global route is calculated. For the validation of the presented method, video and images taken in a simulation environment are included.