This is Treebot. As you might expect, Treebot was designed to do one thing: climb trees. It is by no means the first robot able to do this, but its arboreal predecessors (RiSE and Modsnake and accidentally PackBot are just a few) weren’t autonomous and didn’t have the skills necessary to negotiate the complex network of branches that you tend to find on trees worth climbing.
The design of Treebot is fairly unique: it uses a set of flexible linear actuators connecting two gripping claws to allow it to move around like an inchworm. While the back gripper holds on, the front gripper releases and the body extends forward, allowing the robot to literally feel around for a good place to grip.
Keeping to the inchworm theme, the robot doesn’t use much in the way of fancy sensors. Instead, it’s all tactile. You can tell the robot which direction you’d like it to go and how far, and the robot will grope its way to its destination, adaptively navigating from trunk to branches.
At the moment, Treebot is more or less blind. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it could get where it wants to go much faster if it’s able to tell which branches have the highest potential to allow it to efficiently climb higher up, so researchers are working on ways to help Treebot optimize its climbing path.
TreeBot was designed by Tin Lun Lam and Yangsheng Xu from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and their research was presented at ICRA last week in a paper entitled "Treebot: Autonomous Tree Climbing by Tactile Sensing."
Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.
