Journal of Physics: Conference Series

PAPER • OPEN ACCESS You may also like

- A tailless timing belt climbing platform
A new type of vertical wall-climbing robot utilizing dry adhesives with mushroom
caps
J Krahn, Y Liu, A Sadeghi et al.
To cite this article: Jinfan Lin et al 2022 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 2366 012046
- Design of a Curved Surface Adaptive
Permanent Magnet Wall Climbing Robot
LuShan Zhu and XiongSheng Zheng

- Multimodal pipe-climbing robot with

View the article online for updates and enhancements. origami clutches and soft modular legs
Yongkang Jiang, Diansheng Chen,
Hongying Zhang et al.

This content was downloaded from IP address 41.93.71.4 on 16/11/2023 at 09:28

MCAI-2022 IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 2366 (2022) 012046 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/2366/1/012046

A new type of vertical wall-climbing robot

Jinfan Lin1, Zeming Ren1, Xiaobin Hong1*

1
School of Mechanical & Automotive Engineering, South China University of
Technology. Guangzhou 510640, China.
*
Corresponding author: scut_hongxiaobin@126.com

ABSTRACT: Using robots to replace human beings to achieve large-scale automatic

operations has become an inevitable trend. Wall-climbing robots have important application
value in the field of aerial work. For the existing wall-climbing robots have limitation on
movement flexibility and overcome own gravity by adsorption friction, this paper innovatively
proposes a wall-climbing robot with suspension traction, back push adsorption and McNum
wheel driving. Meanwhile, an electronic control system and control algorithm are designed.
Experiments results show that the wall-climbing robot has advantages of high relative load,
omnidirectional movement, strong continuity of movement and smooth operation.

1. Introduction
Wall-climbing robot is a kind of special robot, which can climb and crawl on vertical walls and other
occasions, and is usually equipped with corresponding equipment to realize various functions such as
cleaning, flaw detection, and detection of the wall. Automatic wall-climbing robots are widely used in
various fields with rapidly development. In recent years, a large number of automatic wall-climbing
robot solutions have emerged. The automatic wall-climbing robot needs to drive and stick to the wall,
to overcome the self-gravity in working. Therefore, the key technologies of automatic wall-climbing
robot are the adsorption device and running gear. The main function of the adsorption device is to
provide a force perpendicular to the wall. The common adsorption methods include negative pressure
adsorption, suction cup adsorption, magnetic adsorption, etc. [1]. The negative pressure adsorption is to
draw out the air in the closed cavity between wall surface and the robot to form a partial vacuum,
which can provide adsorption force by the difference of internal and external pressure [2]. The principle
of suction cup adsorption is similar to that of negative pressure adsorption, but the suction cups for
adsorption also can in the form of foot-like structure [3]. Magnetic adsorption is to use the gravitational
effect between permanent magnet or an electromagnet and a ferromagnetic wall to generate adsorption
force [4]. The running gear is the key component to drives the automatic wall-climbing robot. The
running gear is usually combined with the adsorption device, which can be divide into the legged type,
the crawler type and the wheeled type. The legged type imitates the walking mode of dog to drive the
robot, which is often combined with the suction cup adsorption [5]. The crawler-type uses two crawler
tracks to achieve movement and steering, which can be combined with suction cup adsorption and
magnetic adsorption [6]. The wheeled type is usually used as a driving mode of negative pressure
adsorption or magnetic adsorption.
In the above scheme, the gravity of the wall-climbing robot is completely borne by the friction
between the robot and the wall, which cannot adapt to some high-load situations, and the continuous
movement ability is weak. Therefore, a novel wall-climbing robot with suspension traction, back push
adsorption and McNum wheel driving is proposed.

Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution
of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd 1
MCAI-2022 IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 2366 (2022) 012046 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/2366/1/012046

2. Mechanical Structure Design of Wall-Climbing Robot

The wall-climbing robot mainly consists of suspension traction device, Mecanum wheels, ducted fans
and electronically controlled platform, as shown in Figure 1. The suspension traction device installed a
movable servo spool which is mounted on the horizontal rail. The suspension traction device has two
ropes to pull the wall-climbing robot to overcome self-gravity and assist the vertical movement. The
movement speed, accuracy and direction of the wall-climbing robot have great influence on the
detection quality. In order to control the posture of the wall-climbing robot in real time, the chassis of
the wall-climbing robot is mount with four Mecanum wheels which can be realized omnidirectional
movement of the robot. A number of small rollers are evenly arranged on the surface of the Mecanum
wheel and fixed on the hub. The axis of the small rollers forms a certain angle with the rotation axis of
the hub, and the angle is usually 45°. According to the installation direction of the small rollers, the
Mecanum wheel can be divided into left-handed wheel and right-handed wheel, as shown in Figure 2.
A ducted fan is composed of a fan and a brushless permanent magnet DC motor. The motor is driven
and controlled by a special electronic governor. Four ducted fans are mounted on the chassis with
circular air intake openings, which exhausts backwards to generate thrust force so the wall-climbing
robot can attach to the wall, and provide positive pressure for the Mecanum wheels to drive the wall-
climbing robot. The single-axis electronically controlled platform can be rotated 360°, which can
install with detection devices or other functional equipment.

Figure 1. The three-dimensional model of the wall-climbing robot.

(a) Right-handed wheel (b) Left-handed wheel

Figure 2. The Mecanum wheel

3. Control System Design of Wall-Climbing Robot

3.1 Electric control system design

The framework of the electric control system of the wall-climbing robot is shown in Figure 3. The
wireless remote controller sends commands to the receiver and then sends to the microcontroller,
which controls the McNum wheel and the suspension device according to the remote controller
commands and the feedback signals from the gyroscope. The radio remote controller is consisted of a
ten-channel RadioLink AT9S model remote controller and a R9DS receiver. The model of
microcontroller is STM32F405RGT6. The model of gyroscope is MPU6050.

2
MCAI-2022 IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 2366 (2022) 012046 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/2366/1/012046

The signal output mode of the receiver adopts uses SBUS-PWM mode, and the other two
independent PWM channels directly control the front and rear ducted fans motor speed respectively.
The microcontroller receives multiple PWM signals causing high burden of the hardware performance.
Using SBUS serial communication to receives the remote controller command can greatly reduce the
microcontroller burden. The microcontroller controls and drives the motor by through L298N. The
motor rotation direction, suspension or braking are controlled by changing two IO levels, and the
motor speed is controlled by changing the duty cycle of the PWM signal. The output shaft of motor
connects to the wheel and motor encoder. The motor speed is measured by the M method and then
feedbacks to the microcontroller. The gyroscope is used to obtain the robot pose. The microcontroller
controls the speed of the two motors of the suspension traction device through the ATK-LORA-01
wireless serial communication.

Figure 3. The framework of the electric control system.

The energy power for the whole machine is provided by lithium batteries. The power of the wall
climbing robot is large, and the peak current of the ducted motor can reach 80A. Therefore, the wheels
motor adopts 11.7v3s lithium battery as power supply, while the ducted motor adopts ESC used 22.2V
lithium battery as independent power supply, as shown in Figure 4. The ducted motor ESC has a built-
in buck module to supply power to the remote controller receiver, and the L298N has a built-in buck
module to supply power to the microcontroller. All the electronic control original parts share a
common electrical ground.

Figure 4. The power supply for the wall-climbing robot.

3
MCAI-2022 IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 2366 (2022) 012046 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/2366/1/012046

3.2 Kinematic analysis and PID control design

The relationship between the chassis motion and the McNum wheels motion is analyzed by
establishing the kinematic model. Firstly, the motion state of an individual McNum wheel is studied,
and the velocity decomposition is carried out for the right front wheel as an example, as shown in
Figure 5. Vwa is the linear velocity at the center of a wheel, Vwa1 is the component of Vwa along the axis
direction of the small roller, and Vwa2 is the vertical component, which makes the small roller do spin
motion rotate around the axis and will not affect the overall motion of the wall climbing device.
Therefore, the Vwa2 is not considered in the chassis motion analyzing.
Vwa
Vwa1
Vwa2

Figure 5. The velocity decomposition diagram of the right front wheel.

Then analyze the rotation of the McNum wheel. The radius and angular velocity of the McNum
wheel are r and ωi, respectively. The linear velocity of McNum wheel landing point rotation vwi can
be calculated as follows:
vwi  i r (1)
The angle between the small rollers of the McNum wheel and the rim is 45°. The relationship
between the component Vwi1 of the Vwi which along the axis direction of the small rollers can be
calculated as follows:
| Vwi1 | viw1  vwi  cos 45 (2)

Figure 6. The velocity analysis of the wall-climbing device.

The overall velocity analysis of the wall-climbing device is shown in Figure 6. The xr-o-yr is the
coordinate system of the wall-climbing device, which origin is the center of the rectangle formed by
the four wheels. The motion state of the climbing robot can be expressed as V  Vr Wr  , where Vr
T

4
MCAI-2022 IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 2366 (2022) 012046 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/2366/1/012046

is linear velocity vector of wall climbing robot the and Wr is the rotation. The linear velocity Vwi of the
McNum wheel is provided by the wall-climbing device, which can also be considered as a
superposition of the wall-climbing device linear velocity Vr and the rotational angular velocity on the
McNum wheel linear velocity Vwi3, as shown in equation (3).
Vwi  Vr  Vwi3  Vr  Wr  Ri (3)
where Ri is the vector of the chassis center of the wall climbing robot to the McNum wheel center.
According to equations (1-3), the relationship between the rotation angular velocity of four-wheels
and the velocity vector of device movement under ideal conditions can be calculated as follows:
   
 1 1 1 1   
a

 Vr    b
V  r 1 1 1 1   (4)
Wr   c 
 1 1 1 1   
  
m  n mn mn m  n  d 
where m and n are the distance from origin to wheels in x-axis and y-axis, respectively.
A cascade PID control algorithm is designed according to the actual demand, as shown in Figure 7.
The angular displacement PID controller of wall-climbing robot chassis is the first-PID controller, and
the motor speed PID controller is the second-PID controller. The angular displacement signal sent by
the remote controller is the expectation of the first-PID controller. The the absolute value of angular
displacement which is measured by MPU6050 is the feedback of the first-PID controller. The first-PID
controller outputs the angular velocity Wr, and the remote controller sends the linear velocity
expectation Vr. The V is calculated by kinematic solution, which is the input of the second-PID
controller, and the motor encoder increment is the feedback of the second-PID controller.

Figure 7. The schematic diagram of the cascade PID controller.

In the digital system, the PID controllers use the incremental PID algorithm, which is calculated
using the increment of the control quantity, as follows:
KD 2K D K
u ( k )  u ( k  1)  ( K P  K I  )e( k )  ( K P  )e( k  1)  D e( k  2) (5)
T T T
Where e(k) is the difference between measurement and the expectation of k-th calculation; KP, KI and
KD are the coefficients of proportionality, integration and differentiation, respectively; u(k) and u(k-1)
are the k-th and (k-1)-th controlled quantities, respectively.

4. Experimental results and analysis

The prototype of the wall-climbing robot was fabricated according to the design scheme, as shown in
Figure 8. The size of wall-climbing robot body is 550 × 550 mm. The rated speed of the ducted fan is
51060 rpm. The robustness of the control algorithm indicates the stability of motion state under
different motion commands, which is determined by the PID control parameters. The dual-loop PID
parameters were adjusted through repeated experiments and finally determined as Eq.(6).

5
MCAI-2022 IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 2366 (2022) 012046 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/2366/1/012046

Figure 8. The physical prototype of the wall-climbing robot.

K P1  40, K I 1  5, K D1  40
(6)
K P 2  40, K I 2  0, K D 2  20
Where KP1, KI1, KD1 are the inner-loop proportional, integral and differential coefficients respectively;
KP2, KI2, KD2 are the inner-loop proportional, integral and differential coefficients respectively.
In the paper, the wall-climbing robot is used to detect to damage of glass curtain walls by installing
a camera. In detection operation, the shouting fan is turned on and the thrust magnitude is adjusted to
make the wall-climbing robot stably adsorbed on the glass curtain walls. The wall-climbing robot is
perpendicular to the ground, controlled by a rocker offset. The running speed in the vertical and
transverse directions are controlled by the other two rocker offsets. During the robot's motion, its
heading remains constant and the suspension traction device is able to move in concert with the robot
to overcome the robot's own gravity. By comparing the remote controller command with the McNum
wheel speed, the response speed of the motion command does not exceed 0.5s when the wall-climbing
device is running, and the maximum overshoot does not exceed 5%. The performance of this control
system can meet the inspection demand.

5. Conclusion
In this paper, a wall-climbing robot with suspension traction device, Mecanum wheels, ducted fans
and electronically controlled platform is designed and fabricated, which has advantages of high
relative load, omnidirectional movement, strong motion continuity and smooth operation. Moreover,
targeted electronic control system and control algorithm are designed. The experiment verifies that the
wall-climbing robot can achieve all-round smooth operation under remote control, which can be
equipped with corresponding functional devices to realize the detection and cleaning of walls,
especially glass curtain walls.

References
[1] Da C. "Study on the dynamics analysis and navigation control of tracked wall-climbing robot".
Changchun: Jilin University (2021).
[2] Zhao J, Li X, Bai J. "Experimental study of vortex suction unit-based wall-climbing robot on
walls with various surface conditions". Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical
Engineers, Part C: Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science, 232(21), 3977-3991 (2018).
[3] Ruihua J. "CFD analysis and optimization research on the adsorption device of tracked wall
climbing robot". Changchun: Jilin University (2021).
[4] Fan J, Xu T, Fang Q, Zhao J and Zhu Y. "A novel style design of a permanent-magnetic
adsorption mechanism for a wall-climbing robot". Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics,

6
MCAI-2022 IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 2366 (2022) 012046 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/2366/1/012046

12(3), 035001 (2020).

[5] Huo P, Xu Y, Yu J and Wang, Y. "Design and analysis of a new frame-foot wall-climbing robot".
Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part D: Journal of Automobile
Engineering, 236(7), 1460-1473 (2022).
[6] Yoshida Y, Ma S. "Design of a wall-climbing robot with passive suction cups". 2010 IEEE
International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics. IEEE. 1513-1518 (2010).