In context
Wall-climbing robots have proven valuable for inspection and maintenance on pipelines and walls, but their utility has been limited by an inability to transition between perpendicular vertical surfaces—a common scenario in building exteriors, storage tanks, and industrial structures. Most prior research focused on climbing rough surfaces or transitioning from horizontal to vertical planes, leaving the more challenging vertical-to-vertical transition largely unaddressed.
What was reported
Researchers from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics developed a strategy for a four-legged wall-climbing robot to transition at an inside right-angle corner between two vertical walls. They established a foot-end adhesion force mapping model that relates foot forces to the generalized force at the robot's center of mass, enabling analysis of stability during heterogeneous support (feet on different planes).
Using multi-constraint nonlinear programming, they computed the upper and lower boundaries of the feasible adhesion envelope—the range of foot forces that ensure stable adhesion. This provides a quantitative evaluation index for transition feasibility. The team also designed an optimized transition strategy for stable contact and detachment of feet during the maneuver.
Simulations validated the approach, and experiments on a physical robot platform demonstrated that the strategy significantly improves the success rate of wall transitions, enhancing reliability in real-world applications.
Why it mattered
This work addresses a critical gap in wall-climbing robot mobility, enabling autonomous navigation across perpendicular vertical surfaces without falling. By formalizing the force mapping and adhesion boundaries, it provides a foundation for more versatile climbing robots in industrial inspection, maintenance, and search-and-rescue operations, where complex geometries are common.
“The experimental results show that the strategy can effectively improve the success rate of wall transition and ensure the reliability of wall climbing robot in wall transition application.”
Source: 《机器人》期刊 (robot.sia.cn) · Published 2023-09-16 · “基于黏附稳定包络边界的爬壁机器人竖直壁面过渡策略”