Limb-mechanism robot with winch mechanism

The present paper describes a legged robot equipped with an omni-directional winch mechanism to climb up and down steep inclines. A small and omnidirectional winch mechanism is developed for robots moving in rubble environments. The wire of the winch mechanism can pull a robot on steep inclines. The developed winch mechanism has a guide which can reel up and release a wire in all directions. A legged robot with the developed winch mechanism can move in all directions on steep inclines without changing the direction of the robot. In addition, we propose an idea of using one limb of the robot as a guide for the wire. The method improves flexibility of the robot moving on steep inclines. We show feasibility of our proposed idea through the experiments.