Rescue missions in mountain environments are hardly achievable by standard legged robots-because of the high slopes-or by flying robots-because of limited payload capacity. We present a concept for a rope-aided climbing robot which can negotiate up-to-vertical slopes and carry heavy payloads. The robot is attached to the mountain through a rope, and it is equipped with a leg to push against the mountain and initiate jumping maneuvers. Between jumps, a hoist is used to wind/unwind the rope to move vertically and affect the lateral motion. This simple (yet effective) two-fold actuation allows the system to achieve high safety and energy efficiency. Indeed, the rope prevents the robot from falling while compensating for most of its weight, drastically reducing the effort required by the leg actuator. We also present an optimal control strategy to generate point-to-point trajectories overcoming an obstacle. We achieve fast computation time (<1 s) thanks to the use of a custom simplified robot model. We validated the generated optimal movements in Gazebo simulations with a complete robot model with a < 5% error on a 16 m long jump, showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach, and confirming the interest of our concept. Finally, we performed a reachability analysis showing that the region of achievable targets is strongly affected by the friction properties of the foot-wall contact.

翻译：山地环境中的救援任务难以通过标准腿式机器人（因陡坡限制）或飞行机器人（因有效载荷能力有限）实现。本文提出一种绳索辅助攀爬机器人的概念，该机器人能够适应近乎垂直的陡坡并承载重型载荷。机器人通过绳索附着于山体，并配备一条腿以推压山面并启动跳跃动作。在跳跃间隔期间，利用绞盘收放绳索实现垂直移动并影响侧向运动。这种简单（但有效）的双重驱动机制使系统能够达到高安全性与高能效。实际上，绳索在防止机器人坠落的同时补偿了其大部分重量，大幅减少了腿部执行器所需的驱动力。我们还提出了一种最优控制策略，用于生成可克服障碍物的点对点轨迹。通过使用自定义简化机器人模型，实现了快速计算时间（<1秒）。我们在Gazebo仿真中验证了所生成的最优运动，采用完整机器人模型在16米长跳跃任务中误差小于5%，这表明了所提方法的有效性，并证实了本概念的实用性。最后，我们进行了可达性分析，结果显示可达目标区域受足-墙接触摩擦特性的显著影响。