Study on Mobile Mechanism of a Climbing Robot for Stair Cleaning - A Translational Locomotion Mechanism and Turning Motion to be Faced to a Stair -

In human living environments, it is often the case that the cleaning area is three-dimensional space such as a high-rise building. An autonomous cleaning robot is proposed so as to move on all floors including stairs in a building. The proposed robot has a body frame of a rectangular solid, which is equipped with L-shaped legs on the both sides and drive wheels on the top and bottom sides. The present robot climbs down stairs by rotating the body using L-shaped legs and it moves on smooth surfaces using wheels. In this paper, a mobile mechanism and a control method are described for translational locomotion. The operational check of the translational mechanism was conducted by facing the robot to the edge of stairs using the position sensitive detector (PSD).