LIMBERO: A Limbed Climbing Exploration Robot Toward Traveling on Rocky Cliffs

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. Finally, we integrate these components into LIMBERO and demonstrate its ability to ascend steep rocky surfaces under a 1 G gravity condition, a performance not previously achieved yet for limbed climbing robots of this scale.