Design and analysis of a tree climbing robot

Agricultural operations like tree pruning, identifying pest and disease problems require human beings to climb trees, which is a dangerous job. Even though many researchers have developed systems that could climb trees, most of them, especially the wheeled systems require to be clamped on to the tree surface manually. A completely autonomous system should be capable of navigating towards a tree, clamping on to it and then begin climbing without any manual intervention. This calls for designing a system that can navigate on multiple terrains including tree trunk and flat ground. In this paper we present a novel design for a wheel based tree climbing robot that could be made completely autonomous. The system consists of a base with two arms on both sides. It has four wheels, two large hollow ones enclosing the base and two smaller ones at the end of each arm. This design allows the system to be driven around as a differential drive robot as well. A climbing strategy is proposed in which the system hugs on to the tree such that only the wheels are in contact with the tree surface and then drives up. This allows the system to climb on poles or trees that do not have any branches. The proposed design and climbing strategy has been illustrated and validated through simulation in ADAMS.