A Tree-Climbing Robot Platform: Mechanical Concept, Control Software and Electronic Architectures

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Robotic platforms can be used in countless applications and in the most varied branches of activities. Such results, presented over the last two decades, can be verified in Armada et al., 2003 and Virk, 2005. It deals specifically with robots provided with legs and with the capability, or ability, to climb vertical surfaces, while many other applications/solutions can be found. As an examples: robots to climb lower parts of bridges (Abderrahim et al., 1999), to crawl inside pipes for inspection purposes (Galvez et al., 2001), implemented to perform solder inspection works in nuclear plants (White et al., 1998), to climb metallic structures for inspection purposes (Armada et al., 1990). More examples can be found in marine industry applications, such as walking robots to check internal parts solders in ship hulls, climbing robots for parts solders (Santos et al., 2000) and (Armada et al., 2005), climbing robots for paint cleaning, underwater robots for ballast tank inspection, and underwater robots for hull cleaning (Santos et al., 1997a, 1997b). Robots were demonstrated to be the ideal option for many such applications due to the fact that the working environment is difficult to access or even hazardous or risky for human beings, such as exposure to hazardous substances or environments and risk conditions. Productivity increase and quality issues are also extremely relevant and are considered. However, besides the varied applications and areas mentioned above, there still remains a little explored area: environmental research. As in any other area, different applications or problems can be addressed or solved with the help of a robotics platform. As an example, one can mention the tasks: • Gathering of Botanical Specimens: gathering flower and plant specimen is fundamental for biodiversity studies. Several host species are found in high trees, and their collection is actually risky. Thus, this is an application where a robotics platform with tree climbing capability can be used to minimize risks for the researchers involved in this type of activity. • Gathering of vegetable material: collection of vegetable material is a fundamental activity for phytochemistry. Every pharmaceutical preparation that uses as raw material plant parts such as leaves, stems, roots, flowers, and seeds, with known O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w .ite ch on lin e. co m