Wall-climbing Robot 1

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Electroadhesive Robots

Enabling wall-climbing robots for security/military,
inspection, and service applications
Electroadhesion offers advantages over other types of technologies
for wall climbing, including robust clamping over a variety of surfaces
(rough or smooth, conductive or insulating), low power, resistance
to dust, and fast, electrically controllable clamping and unclamping
. Thus, electroadhesion lends itself to a variety of wall-climbing
robots. Tracked "tank" type wall-climbing robots, as well as more
biomimetic inchworm-type robots, have been successfully
demonstrated to date using this technology. Other
advantages of electroadhesion include its non-damaging
nature, and lightweight, which is crucial in wall-climbing applications.http://www.sri.com/rd/electroadhesion.html

NINJA-I, -II
Quadruped Wall Climbing Robot "NINJA-I, -II"

NINJA-I (1990-1993), NINJA-II (1994-). It is dangerous to inspect
and perform all the operations on the exterior walls of high rise
buildings and of the land bridges on high speed thoroughfares.
It also requires a great deal of expense in order to install the
needed scaffolding. NINJA is a wall climbing robot developed for
the purpose of automating this kind of operation. Units No. 1 and
2 of both have a height of nearly 1.8 m , a left/right width of
0.5 meters, a thickness of 0.4 meters, and a main body weight of
45 kg. All the legs of NINJA-I, as in Fig. 2, are driven by three
prismatic joint actuators in parallel mechanisms. They are oriented
to the direction of gravity as much as possible at all times, and
manifest th e effectiveness of "coupled drive (a drive method which
plans on making high output performance as a system by
cooperatively utilizing as much as possible all actuators that are
installed)". The feet are compliant to the wall surface while being
oriented at all times in the same direction as the body by a new
parallel movement mechanism which utilizes conduit wires.
The NINJA-II expands the reachable area of this foot mechanism
by inserting articulated joints.more
Wall-Climbing Robot Spies at ICRA 2008