Climbing Service Robots for Improving Safety in Building Maintenance Industry

Abstract

Climbing robots for building inspection and maintenance have many advantages over traditional manual approaches because the formers are more accurate and efficient. For certain hazardous industries such as nuclear or chemical industry, climbing robots may be the only means for carrying out the inspection and maintenance tasks as the environments are dangerous to human operators. As a result, climbing robots are becoming more and more popular in doing building maintenance industry in the future. In this chapter, several climbing robots including WIC, SADIE and Robug III are discussed. These robots have been used in some practical applications before and have proved their usefulness in building maintenance industry. Currently, most of these robots are one-off design so that they are comparatively expensive. Consequently, the applications of these robots are still restricted to tasks which either require accurate inspection results or are hazardous to human works. In addition to the robots description themselves, this chapter has also discussed a novel automatic impact-acoustic technique for inspecting tile wall. Besides, as Robug III is a walking and climbing robots with multiple articulated legs, it is essential to develop an effective gait generation system to achieve the robot control. Therefore, an GA based gait generation algorithm is also reported. Since most of these climbing robots are teleoperated in outdoor or dirty environment, the development concept of a robust and water-proof control console is also discussed with the details of the robot instruction by gesture recognition.