A Crawler Climbing Robot Integrating Electroadhesion and Electrostatic Actuation

Abstract

Previous electroadhesive climbing robots generally employed typical electromagnetic motors, which spoiled some of the advantages of electroadhesion such as it being light, thin and flexible. To improve these, an integration of electrostatic actuation and adhesion was utilized in this work. By using FEM analyses, the present paper analysed the effect of design parameters on adhesive and driving forces respectively, and examined the possible interference between electrostatic actuation and adhesion inside the integration. Then this article discussed the driving force, payload capacity and torque balance of the robot with the integration. Based on these analyses, we designed and fabricated a lightweight (94 g) and low-height (15 mm) prototype with electrode films made by screen printing. Experiments on the prototype demonstrated that it can adhere to a vertical wall stably and move at a maximum speed of 35.3 mm/s.