A climbing robot for inspection of lamppost in the airport: Design and preliminary experiments

Abstract

A climbing robot is developed to help people inspect lamps on the top of 30 meters lampposts of the airport in this paper. Its movement is realized by a dual symmetric chain and sprocket movement mechanism, assisted by a novel combination of a compression mechanism with a suspension mechanism. The compression mechanism compresses the link chain and the rubber teeth against the rope, while the suspension mechanism adjusts with the chain and sprocket movement to squeeze the compression mechanism against the opposite the link chain and the rubber teeth to make tight contact with the rope. A powerful brush DC motor powered by lithium-ion battery makes the robot run on the robot stably. Experiments show it can keep its weight less than 16kg but load almost 58kg, moreover, even the lithium-ion battery power off, the robot can stay in its position securely. The climbing robot we design can maneuver on a wire cable with a cross-sectional diameter varying from 10cm to 14cm with a stable and secure speed of 1m/s, and runs in the secure speed continually for almost 2 hours. Simple P control is used in the robot, but the robot can perfectly track the sine curve while running on a wire cable. The detail inspection pictures show it fulfills the high height inspection nice and well.