SCALER: A Tough Versatile Quadruped Free-Climber Robot
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This paper introduces SCALER, a quadrupedal robot that demonstrates climbing on bouldering walls, overhangs, and ceilings and trotting on the ground. SCALER is one of the first high-degrees of freedom four-limbed robots that can free-climb under the Earth's gravity and one of the most mechanically efficient quadrupeds on the ground. Where other state-of-the-art climbers are specialized in climbing itself, SCALER promises practical free-climbing with payload and ground locomotion, which realizes true versatile mobility. A new climbing gait, SKATE gait, increases the payload by utilizing the SCALER body linkage mechanism. SCALER achieves a maximum normalized locomotion speed of 1.87 /s, or 0.56 m/s on the ground and 1.2 /min, or 0.42 m/min in bouldering wall climbing. Payload capacity reaches 233 on the ground and 35 adaptable underactuated two-finger gripper, successfully grasps convex and non-convex objects and supports SCALER.
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