Mechanical Design of a Cable Climbing Robot for Inspection on a Cable-Stayed Bridge

Abstract

In this paper, a novel mechanical design for a cable climbing robot called CCRobot is presented. The CCRobot is capable of attaching on a cable with a small range of curvature and some obstacles. The weight of CCRobot is less than 15 kg, and its load capacity is more than 30 kg. Its maximum motion speed is more than 0.05 m/s. The grippers of CCRobot are actuated by only two actuators symmetrically. The unique mechanism makes the grippers able to attach on the cable tightly. With the usage of worm gearing transmission system, the designed mechanism also allows zero energy consumption in static gripping. Numerous on-cable locomotion of CCRobot's mechanism have been realized and the experiment result shows that the proposed mechanical design is effective.