As civil structures become massive and high, the maintenance and inspection for the structures are getting important, however most of the conventional maintenance and inspection methods are labor-intensive. It has a problem of the large cost due to the staffing professionals, lack of professional manpower and high risk for hard to reach areas.
To solve these problems, the needs of wall-climbing robots are emerged. Infrastructure-based wall-climbing robots have been studied for a long time to inspect and maintain an outer wall of building with high payload and safety. However, the infrastructure must be installed on the wall to use the robot and it can injure the exterior of the structure. Consequently, the architects don’t prefer the infrastructure-based wall-climbing robots. In case of the non-infra-based wall-climbing robot, it is researched to overcome the aforementioned problems and gaining attention recently.
Most of the non-infra-based wall-climbing robots, they stick to the wall using adhesion mechanisms such as magnetics, vacuum system or adhesion materials instead of the infrastructure that installed on the wall, but most of the technologies are in the laboratory level since the payload, safety and maneuverability are not satisfactory.
To overcome these problems, a MAV(Micro Aerial Vehicle) type wall-climbing robot is proposed in this work. The robot is designed to climb a wall and flying with four rotors and wheels. It can fly using the thrust forces generated by four rotors. Also, it can stick to the wall with the same thrust forces and then climb the wall with four wheels.
The wall-climbing robot can stabilize its position even if it is suddenly detached from the wall by unexpected disturbances using the flying capability. It makes the maneuverability and safety of the robot improved. The forward dynamics and inverse dynamics of the robot are solved and the controllers are proposed. Also, it is simulated by MATLAB and WORKING MODEL 2D software and then it is verified through experiments with a prototype.
Source: YouTube