Octopus - An Autonomous Wheeled Climbing Robot

TLDR

The paper introduces Octopus, an autonomous off‑road wheeled robot that can navigate rough terrain without getting stuck, and presents a two‑dimensional static model and controller for it. Octopus features eight motorized wheels, 15 degrees of freedom (14 motorized), tilt sensors, and tactile wheels, and its controller uses ground contact points, articulation angles, and gravity direction to compute wheel and forearm torques and a body position setpoint.

Abstract

This paper presents an innovative off-road wheeled mobile robot, named Octopus, able to deal autonomously with obstacles in rough terrain without getting stuck. To achieve such a performance, the robot is equipped with tilt sensors and tactile wheels. The sophisticated locomotion mechanism of Octopus has 8 motorized wheels and a total of 15 degrees of freedom (14 of them are motorized). A two-dimensional static model and a controller are proposed. The inputs of the controller are the contact points with ground, the geometric angles of the articulations, and the direction of the gravity field. The outputs of the controller are the torques for the wheels, the torques for the forearms, and the position set point for the body.