Design, simulation and experimentation of a biomimetic wall-climbing robot with tracked spines

Abstract

This paper presents a novel cooperative grasping wheeled wall-climbing robot with the ability to climb concrete, brick walls using tracked-spines arrays located around the track. The robot uses a combination of the crank-link mechanism and gear transmission to control the tracked spines on both sides of the robot to grasp the asperities. The kinematic and dynamic analysis of the crank-link mechanism and the simulation demonstrate that the motion state of the robot is stable in the climbing process. By means of wireless communication, the control information is transmitted to the main controller, which drives the motors to make each mechanism work together. Finally, the prototype is fabricated and several experiments are carried out to verify the climbing performance of the robot.