Micro aerial vehicle type wall-climbing robot mechanism

Nowadays, as the building structures are getting taller and taller, the importance of maintenance or inspection of these structures is being increased. However, it has some problems due to the lack of professional manpower and there is a risk in maintaining those areas that are hard to reach, besides the high maintenance cost. The unmanned wall-climbing robots for the areas hard to reach have been researched to solve the problems. The infrastructure-based wall-climbing robots have high payload and safety but the robots need the infrastructure that should be installed on the target structure. The infrastructure is not preferred by the architects since it can be harmful to the exterior of the structure. For this reason, wall-climbing robots that do not need any infrastructure are being researched. Nevertheless, most of the non-infrastructure-based wall-climbing robots are in the laboratory level since the payload, safety and maneuverability are not satisfactory. To overcome these problems, a flight-possible wall-climbing robot mechanism is proposed in this paper. The robot is based on the quadrotor system that is a well-known aerial vehicle using four rotors. It uses thrust forces induced by the four rotors not only to fly but also to stick on the wall. The flight capability makes its maneuverability and safety greatly enhanced. The feasibility of the mechanism is shown through simulations and experiments with a prototype.