Visual control of a stair-climbing robot

In the paper, a robot designed to move up-and-down stairs is also equipped with an arm for grasping objects to provide service for the elders. The robot consists of a main body with roller chains attached with rubber blocks used to generate friction with ground and stairs for moving, a front arm and a rear arm for balance as moving up and down stairs, a CMOS camera for vision, and the third robot arm is controlled via the video camera for capturing objects. Simple algorithms of image processing are implemented in the FPGA board that generates the X- and Y-axis commands of the third arm to capture/load objects. Walking experiments of the stair-climbing robot to move up and down stairs are shown. The object tracking and capturing by the robot arm and camera verifies the proposed design.