Stair climbing control of 4-degrees-of-freedom tracked vehicle based on internal sensors

In search and rescue missions, multi-degree-of-freedom (DOF) tracked robots that are equipped with subtracks are supposed to be useful. These types of robots have superior locomotion performance on rough terrain. However, in teleoperated missions, the performance of tracked robots relies on the operators' skill to control every subtrack appropriately. Therefore, an autonomous traversal function can significantly help in the teleoperation of such robots. In this paper, we propose a planning and control method for 4-DOF tracked robots traversing known stairs automatically, based on internal sensors. Some experimental results in mock-up stairs verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.