Design And Experiment Of Wall Climbing Robot System Based On Electrostatic Adsorption

Wall climbing robot is a kind of extreme working robots with mobile and absorptive function. It is widely used in the field of nuclear industry, petrochemical enterprises, construction industry, firefighting department and shipbuilding industry and so on. Although several kinds of wall climbing robot with different absorptive method have been developed in domestic and foreign research institutions, its shortcomings variously restrict the application of wall climbing robot in some practical situations. A new wall climbing robot is designed in this paper through electrostatic adsorption technology with the advantages of strong adaptability, light weight, low noise, low power consumption, simple structures and so on.Firstly, this paper calculated the equivalent electrostatic adsorption force and qualitatively analyzed the distribution of electrostatic field on the conductor and dielectric surface, which based on the study of the mechanism of electrostatic adsorption. The motion type of wall climbing robot was proposed and the overall structure of robot system was designed.Secondly, the kinematic, static and dynamic mechanism of wall climbing robot were studied. For the safety of the robot on the wall, the static model was built in the circumstance of slide and overturning failures. The kinematics model was established and the relationships among position, velocity and acceleration were analyzed. In order to describe the relationships between fore, torque and motion state, the dynamics model was established for the wall climbing robot.Thirdly, this paper accomplished the control system of wall climbing robot including man-machine interface of upper computer and embedded control system of lower computer. The upper machine is used to monitor the robot, so that operators could control it remotely through wireless communication. The lower machine is an embedded system which based on ARM controller; it receives commands from the upper machine to complete the adhesion and motion of the robot, collects and transmits the motion state of robot to the operators for further decisions.Finally, the electrostatic adsorption device of wall climbing robot was designed and manufactured, and the experiments of the electrostatic adhesion force were researched on different walls. According to the experimental results, a prototype of wall climbing robot with crawler type was designed, the experiments of adhesion and drive motion were accomlished on different material walls and the results of experiments was also analyzed.