4steel-robot: a climbing mobile robot for gas containers inspection

Abstract

The purpose of the project is to design and build a wireless wall climbing robot to accomplish remotely ultrasonic and visual inspections in large gas containers, avoiding in this way the necessity to use scalfolding and reduce the risks for the technicians in charge of these works. The robot is proposed as a four-legged machine, whose legs are built by means of a servomotor and a linear actuator. Other objective of this work is prouve if two degrees of freedom are enough to achieve the movility required for the robot. For the control of the robot a single board computer is being used, employing for this purpose Max-FORTH as the programming language of the microcontroller. At this moment several experiments have being carried out to demonstrate the performance of the gait proposed for this walking machine. The advances in the developing of this machine are here presented.