Design and Analysis of a Push Shovel‐Type Hull‐Cleaning Wall‐Climbing Robot

ABSTRACT To address the problem of difficulty in removing marine biofouling due to the variable curvature of the ship wall, this study proposed a marine biofouling removal wall‐climbing robot equipped with an adaptive variable curvature wall cleaning module. The robot includes a mobile module, a cleaning module, and a magnetic module. The cleaning module uses push shovel cleaning technology to scrape away marine biofouling. It adopts a rigid‐flexible coupling mechanism design and can passively adapt to ship walls with different curvatures. A barnacle stress model was established, and the front angle of the push shovel was selected to be 60° through numerical simulation. On this basis, a robot adsorption failure model was established, and the minimum magnetic force required by the robot when the safety factor was 1.5 was obtained to be 1084 N. Based on the structure size of the robot, Ansys was used to conduct a comparative analysis on the adsorption efficiency of four Halbach Array magnetic circuit structures and determined that the magnetic force generated by the five‐magnetic circuit structure is relatively higher. Based on this, the structural dimensions of the magnetic module were designed, and the effects of air gap and wall thickness on magnetic force were analyzed. It was found that when the wall thickness exceeds 6 mm, the impact on magnetic force is small, and the air gap should be set within 10 mm. A robot prototype was built, and its performance was tested. The experimental results show that the robot has good motion performance; it can reach about 5 m underwater and move stably, and has good waterproof performance; when the robot moves circumferentially on the wall, the cleaning module can adapt to surfaces with a curvature of 3 m or more, and has good surface self‐adaptation ability; it is effective in removing marine biofouling.