A Bio-Inspired Small-Sized Wall-Climbing Caterpillar Robot

Climbing robots work in a special vertical environment and use mobility against gravity (Zhang, 2007). They are a special potential sub-group of mobile technology. In the recent 15 years, there have been considerable achievements in climbing robot research worldwide by exploring potential applications in hazardous and unmanned environments (Virk, 2005). The typical application of climbing robots includes reliable non-destructive evaluation and diagnosis in the nuclear industry, the chemical industry and the power generation industry (Longo, et al., 2004), welding and manipulation in the construction industry (Armada, et al., 1998), cleaning and maintenance for high-rise buildings in the service industry (Elkmann, et al., 2002) and urban search and rescue in military and civil applications (Wu, et al., 2006). However, until now, there are few successful prototypes that are both small enough and move flexibly enough to negotiate surfaces with a complex structure. It is common to design rather big and heavy climbing robots. The difficulties of developing a flexible and small climbing robot with full locomotion capabilities include not only the weight reduction of the mechanism but also the miniaturization of the flexible construction. An additional problem is the fact that the intelligent technology in many climbing robotic prototypes is not developed enough. The purpose of this paper is to present a novel bio-inspired climbing caterpillar robot which is currently under construction in our consortium. We combine the climbing technology with bio-inspired research to create a novel robotic prototype which has a cognitive potential and can climb and move flexibly in its working environment. This paper only concentrates on the design and realization of the current climbing robotic prototype. Other details such as gaits, motion kinematics and dynamics will be discussed in other publications. This paper is organized as follows. First the related work on climbing robots and the biologically inspired mobile robotic system will be introduced systematically in section 2. At 1