Treebot: Autonomous tree climbing by tactile sensing

Abstract

This paper proposed an autonomous tree climbing algorithm for a novel tree climbing robot named Treebot. Making a robot realize an environment and climb on a tree autonomously is a challenging task as the shape of tree is complex and irregular. To our best knowledge, this is the first paper dealing with the autonomous climbing problem in an unknown tree environment. The proposed method is aimed to use minimal sensing resources to achieve autonomous climbing. It reconstructs the shape of tree by using tactile sensors and guides the robot to climb along an optimal path. Numerous experiments have been carried out and the results are satisfactory. © 2011 IEEE.