LIMBERO: A Limbed Climbing Exploration Robot Toward Traveling on Rocky Cliffs
Kentaro Uno, Masazumi Imai, Kazuki Takada, Teruhiro Kataonami, Yudai Matsuura, Antonin Ringeval-Meusnier, Keita Nagaoka, Mikio Eguchi, Ryo Nishibe, Kazuya Yoshida

TL;DR
LIMBERO is a lightweight quadrupedal climbing robot with innovative spine-type grippers, capable of traversing steep rocky terrains, advancing lunar and planetary exploration robotics.
Contribution
The paper introduces a novel lightweight gripper design and an algorithm for assessing graspability on rough terrain, enabling LIMBERO to climb steep surfaces.
Findings
Achieved stable climbing on steep rocky surfaces.
Designed a lightweight, high-force gripper with coupled motions.
Developed a graspability visualization algorithm.
Abstract
In lunar and planetary exploration, legged robots have attracted significant attention as an alternative to conventional wheeled robots, which struggle to traverse rough and uneven terrain. To enable locomotion over highly irregular and steeply inclined surfaces, limbed climbing robots equipped with grippers on their feet have emerged as a promising solution. In this paper, we present LIMBERO, a 10 kg-class quadrupedal climbing robot that employs spine-type grippers for stable locomotion and climbing on rugged and steep terrain. We first introduce a novel gripper design featuring coupled finger-closing and spine-hooking motions, tightly actuated by a single motor, which achieves exceptional grasping performance (>150 N) despite its lightweight design (525 g). Furthermore, we develop an efficient algorithm to visualize a geometry-based graspability index on continuous rough terrain.…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSoft Robotics and Applications · Robotic Locomotion and Control · Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence
