We have previously developed a brachiation controller that allows a two degree of freedom robot to swing from handhold to handhold on a horizontal ladder with evenly space rungs as well as swing up from a suspended posture using a “target dynamics” controller. In this paper, we extend this class of algorithms to handle the much more natural problem of locomotion over irregularly spaced handholds. Numerical simulations and laboratory experiments illustrate the effectiveness of this generalization.
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