Service Robotic Systems for Glass Curtain Walls Cleaning on the High-rise Buildings

The last decade has seen an increasing interest in developing and employing service robots for building maintenance. Cleaning the curtain walls of high-rise buildings is always very dangerous and strenuous. This paper describes three different kinds of cleaning robots developed by the authors cooperated with the researchers in Robotics Institute of BeiHang University. Sky Cleaner 3 for the glass curtain wall of Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, the auto-climbing robot for the spherical surface of the National Grand Theatre of China, and an automatic cleaning gondola for the windows of Beijing Hotel are introduced. The individual robots’ mechanisms and unique characteristics are discussed in detail. The main special features of the three cleaning robots are given as a summary.