Energy-based swing-back control for continuous brachiation of a multilocomotion robot

We propose an energy-based control method for a multilocomotion robot to improve the stability of continuous brachiation. The target continuous brachiation is an effective locomotion from one bar to another exchanging a kinetic energy with potential energy like a pendulum. Our control strategy for the continuous brachiation is to control the swing-back action so that the robot pumps up the feasible energy to grasp a target bar, and then the locomotion action is designed based on the symmetric motion of a pendulum in order to conserve the total energy: summation of the kinetic and potential energy. The proposed controller is implemented on a new type of mobile multilocomotion robot named "Gorilla Robot III" whose dimensions are mimicking those of a gorilla. Continuous brachiation on various uniform ladders is experimentally achieved with this robot. The experimental results show the validity of our control algorithm. (c) 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.