Tetherbot: Experimental Demonstration and Path Planning of Cable-Driven Climbing in Microgravity

In this paper, we introduce Tetherbot, a cable-driven climbing robot designed for microgravity environments with sparse holding points, such as space stations or asteroids. Tetherbot consists of a platform with a robotic arm that is suspended via cables from multiple grippers. It achieves climbing locomotion by alternately positioning the platform with the cables and relocating the grippers with the robotic arm from one holding point to the next. The main contribution of this work is the first experimental demonstration of autonomous cable-driven climbing in an environment with sparse holding points. To this end, we outline the design, kinematics, and statics of the Tetherbot and present a path planning algorithm to relocate the grippers. We demonstrate autonomous cable-driven climbing through an experiment conducted in a simulated microgravity environment using the path planning algorithm and a prototype of the robot. The results showcase Tetherbot’s ability to achieve autonomous cable-driven climbing locomotion, thereby demonstrating that cable-driven climbing is a viable concept and laying the foundation for future robots of this type.