Building wheeled robots able to climb stairs. Implementation of control architectures reducing the need of human intervention for teleoperation and subsequently increasing the autonomy of mobile robots. Active locomotion concepts use a feedback of the environment to adapt their configuration. High mobility is mainly insured by the quality of the control strategy and the pertinent integration of sensors in the structure. Robots using passive locomotion adapt purely passively their structure during the motion to insure their stability.
Current research covers the use of parallel mechanisms to improve passive climbing abilities.
Hybrid walking-rolling locomotion is studied to keep high mobility in unstructured environments.