Autonomous stair climbing for mobile tracked robot

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of overcoming a flight of stairs in an uncertain environment with an autonomous tracked robot. A complete autonomous stair climbing module is developed which handles a number of tasks involved in stair climbing and a divide and conquer approach is adopted where the stair climbing challenge is further divided into several individual tasks such as stairs detection in an uncertain environment, intelligent climbing control to overcome the stairs, detection of the end of the stairs and the subsequent landing procedure to prevent damage to the onboard devices. A fuzzy control is developed and experimental results obtained have clearly illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach. © 2011 IEEE.