Design and Development of a Flexible Steel Surface Climbing Inspection Robot

Motivated by a high demand for automated inspection of civil infrastructure, this paper presents a novel design and development of a tank-like robot for structural health monitoring. Unlike most existing magnetic wheeled mobile robot designs, which is only suitable for climbing on flat steel surface, our proposed tank-like robot design uses reciprocating mechanism and roller-chains to make it capable of climbing on different structural shapes (e.g., cylinder, cube) with coated or non-coated steel surfaces. The robot can transition from one surface to the other (e.g., from flat surface to curving surface). Taking into account of several strict considerations (including tight dimension, efficient adhesion and climbing flexibility) to adapt with variety shapes of steel structures, a prototype tanklike robot incorporating multiple sensors (hall effects, sonars, inertial measurement unit and camera), has been developed. Rigorous analysis of robot kinematics, adhesion force, sliding failure and turn-over failure has been conducted to demonstrate the stability of the proposed design. Experimental results and field deployments confirm the adhesion and climbing capability of the developed robot.