Research And Development On Control System Of A Wall-climbing Robot

This article presents a traction cables driven climbing robot, which introduces a limitless climbing equipment to drive the robot climbing by transforming the power from motors to the friction between the robot and the cables. There could be two driving methods based on the limitless climbing equipment, one is the long-distance method, which is putting the motors onto the ground; the other is the short-distance method, which is putting the motors on the robot itself. This article concerns the short-distance driving method.Firstly, the robot's dynamic equation when it is climbing up is created according to the Lagrange's Equation after simplifying the robot's mdoel, and a simulation system of the robot is developed by using Simulink, from which the robot's dynamic characteristics are studied.Secondly, a prototype of the robot using short-distance driving method is designed. The most important contents of the paper are the development of the opened control system and the control methods of the robot's prototype under point-to-point and linear movement. On the prototype of the robot, DC motors are used, power is transformed through gears, and rotary encoders are used to get the length value that the rope has changed as feedback information to the control system. The control system is an embedded system based on ARM processor and μCLinux operating system. What have been completed are designing the circuit board, transplanting μCLinux, coding the models of GPIO and TIMER, studying of the robot's kinematics characteristics under constant speed and developing the robot's controlling software.Finally, the robot's prototype and its control system are tested under actual enviroment. The test results' accuracy of the point-to-point and linear movement are analysed by comparing with the results of the simulation, the reasons why the accuracy of linear or curvilinear movement is poor and the methods how to improve the accuracy are figured out.