Development of Uneven-Surface-Adaptive Permanent Magnet Unit

Abstract

Magnetic adsorption device is one of the important technological elements which will be used for many part of the robot industries, and it might especially be used for the wall climbing robots or devices on iron wall. But, there exists some practical problems. One of the most important ones is the tendency to decrease the adsorptive force when it have to stick to the uneven iron wall such as the wall with rivets and welding parts. This paper propose a new magnetic device which will produce large magnetic adsorption force even though the surface of the iron wall is not flat. It consists of array of permanent magnets and steady yokes with multiple holes, and movable yokes are installed inside the holes of the steady yokes. The newly introduced magnetic device has following features: (1) new force balancing array of the permanent magnets, (2) partially located movable yokes, and (3) edge arrangement of the steady yoke to reduce unbalancing force to the movable yokes. We also introduced a locking mechanism for the movable yokes to increase the adsorption force on uneven iron wall. We made experiments of these newly introduced magnetic devices and shown that the device can greatly increase the magnetic adsorption force even on uneven iron wall.