City-Climbers at Work

Abstract

The video presents recent progress of the wall-climbing robot project at the City College of New York. The robots are named as City-Climbers which adopt a novel adhesive mechanism based on aerodynamic attraction to achieve good balance between strong adhesion force and high mobility. The video demonstrates that the City-Climber robots can operate on virtually any kind of smooth or rough surfaces and have the capabilities to move on the ground, climb walls, and transit between them. The modular design achieves both fast motion of each module on planar surfaces and smooth transition between the surfaces by a set of two modules. The video also displays the Fluent simulation results of the aerodynamic attraction with the aim to optimize the design. DSP-based control system is introduced which enables the robot to operate both manually and autonomously