Reliability Improvement of a Crawler-Type Ceiling Mobile Robot in Starting, Accelerating, and Traveling Phase at High Speed

The ceiling serves as an ideal location for robots to handle transportation tasks, as it ensures minimal interference between automated guided vehicles (AGV) and human activities. A previous study developed a ceiling mobile robot called HanGrawler 2. It can travel at a high speed of 1.0 m/s to compete with ground vehicles. However, it occasionally fails during high-speed travel. This study aims to improve the reliability of starting, accelerating, and traveling at high speed. Optical motion capture is used to observe the crawler behavior of HanGrawler 2. The observation of the crawler behavior revealed that the crawler moves on an inflated trajectory during the high-speed movement. In addition, the experimental results show that the collision is not caused by the inflation, but by the push-in timing. The reliability of high-speed travel was improved by installing an encoder and optimizing the push-in timing in accordance with speed fluctuations.