Abstract – This paper presents the design of the permanent
magnetic system for the wall climbing robot with permanent
magnetic tracks. A proposed wall climbing robot with permanent
magnetic adhesion mechanism for inspecting the oil tanks is
briefly put forward, including the mechanical system
architecture. The permanent magnetic adhesion mechanism and
the tracked locomotion mechanism are employed in the robot
system. By static and dynamic force analysis of the robot, design
parameters about adhesion mechanism are derived. Two types of
the structures of the permanent magnetic units are given in the
paper. The analysis of those two types of structure is also
detailed. Finally, two wall climbing robots equipped with those
two different magnetic systems are discussed and the
experiments are included in the paper.
Index Terms – Wall climbing robot, magnetic adhesion,
tracked locomotion mechanism.
I. INTRODUCTION
The wall climbing robot is one kind of the special mobile
robots. Because the workspace of this kind of robots is often
on the vertical plane, not only does the wall climbing robot
need to have the same locomotion mechanism as mobile
robots, it also needs the special adhesion mechanism to
support it to absorb on the vertical walls. Therefore, it is more
challenging to develop a wall climbing robot that a mobile
robot.
To increase operation efficiency and protect human’s
health and safety in hazardous tasks makes the wall climbing
robot very attractive. By developing for several decades, the
wall climbing robot is widely applied in different industrial
departments, such as the inspection and maintenance of
storage tanks in nuclear power plants and petrochemical
enterprises [1][2], ship hull welding and cleaning [3], rescue
robots for fire fighting [4], the cleaning of high-rise buildings
[5] [6], etc.
According to the locomotion mechanism, the wall
climbing robot can be pided into four groups, namely,
wheeled mechanism [7], tracked mechanism [8], legged
mechanism [9], and locomotion based on arms and grippers
[10]. According to the adhesion mechanism, the wall climbing
robot can be pided into four groups, that is, magnetic
adhesion, vacuum sucker, propeller [11], and dry adhesion
using nanofabrication techniques [12]. Different adhesion
mechanism and different locomotion mechanism can be
combined to form different wall climbing robots.
The first wall climbing robot can be dated back to 60s last
century, developed by Nishi [13]. This wall climbing robot
has a large volume and is very heavy, using single vacuum
sucking cup. Later, around 80s, the wall climbing robot has
been developed rapidly. In particular, recently various wall
climbing robots are developed for wall cleaning, inspection,
maintenance, etc. A family of sky cleaner robots which are
totally actuated by pneumatic cylinders and sucked to the
glass walls with vacuum suckers are presented in [5][6]. The
type of this robot has lightweight and dexterous due to
pneumatic actuators, but it still needs a following system to
secure its safety. A miniature wall climbing robot is developed
in [14][15]. The climbing robot is supported by two suction
feet which can hold on smooth and non-porous surfaces. A
three-limbed climbing robot in vertical natural terrain is given
in [16]. The robot can climb real, vertical natural terrain, being
applied for military and civilian used as search, rescue,
reconnaissance, and planetary exploration. A quadruped
walking and climbing robot for NDT (non-destructive testing)
is put forward in [17]. The quadruped robot, called
“MRWALL SPECT III”, can walk in planes as well as climb 永磁性爬壁机器人英文文献和中文翻译:http://www.751com.cn/fanyi/lunwen_5034.html