Design and simulation of throwable mobile robot stair-climbing mechanism

Characterizing small and light, throwable mobile robots are portable and easy to be deployed, so they are widely used in investigation, rescue, detecting and so on. But throwable mobile robots could not climb up stairs for their small dimensions. In this paper, a stair-climbing mechanism was presented for throwable mobile robots. In common cases, the robot still was deployed by throwing. The stair-climbing mechanism only was equipped when the robot had to work on different floors, and the robot must be controlled remotely into work space. A control strategy was designed corresponding to that structure, and a mechanism-control system model was established based on Recurdyn and Matlab/Simulink software. The results of virtual stair-climbing experiments show that, the robot can autonomously climb stairs up and down steadily with this mechanism. This mechanism can solve the contradiction of throwable robots' dimensions and their stair-climbing capability.