A Biomimetic Wheel-Track Wall-Climbing Robot Based on Rolling Adsorption Mechanism

Abstract

Wall climbing robots have a wide range of applications in the field of transportation, petrochemicals, aerial construction, and other monitoring prospects; however, for complex defects on the wall, it is easy for the robot to fall off from attachment. This paper puts forward the bionic wheel-tracked rolling adsorption wall-climbing robots. The paper designs flexible material as sealing material for the negative pressure chamber of wall-climbing robots through the imitation of the biological mechanism of the insect adhesion pads. The material has the advantages of wear resistance, strong wall adaptability, large load, simple structure, etc., and it has a highly reliable and stable adsorption ability on unstructured and complex walls. The mathematical model of adsorption of the wall-crawling robot is constructed in different wall environments, and the kinematic analysis is carried out. The influence of the leakage on the adsorption capacity due to the deformation of the flexible sealing material, defects of the wall surface and the air ducts formed under different roughnesses is analyzed. Through the fabrication and experiment of the prototype, the correctness of the theoretical analysis is verified. The measured load capacity of the robot is 2.47 times its own weight, and it has great obstacle-crossing ability.