If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -This paper presents the design of climbing robots for glass-wall cleaning. Design/methodology/approach -A systemic analysis of the basic functions of a glass-wall cleaning system is given based on the research of working targets. Then the constraints for designing a glass-wall cleaning robot are discussed. The driving method, the attachment principle, mechanical structure and unique aspects of three pneumatic robots named Sky Cleaners follow. In the end a summary of the main special features is given. All three climbing robots are tested on site. Findings -Our groups spent several years in designing and developing a series of robots named Sky Cleaners which are totally actuated by pneumatic cylinders and sucked to the glass walls with vacuum grippers in mid-air. It was found that they can meet the requirements of glass-wall cleaning.Research limitation/implications -The air source, cleaning liquid and control signals should be provided by the supporting vehicle stationed on the ground. Even if the robots are intelligent, the suitable working height is below 50 m because the weight of the hoses has to be taken into account when the robots work in mid-air. Practical implications -The cleaning robotic systems can avoid workers presence in a hazardous environment and realize an automatic cleaning, furthermore reduce operation costs and improve the technological level and productivity of the service industry in the building maintenance. Originality/value -Sky Cleaner robots can move and do cleaning on the plane glass wall or the special curve wall with a small angle between the glasses. The first two prototypes are mainly used for research and the last one is a real product designing for cleaning the glass surface of Shanghai Science and Technology Museum.

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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a robotic cleaning system for applying on the glass facade of the control tower at the Guangzhou Airport, in Guangzhou, China. Design/methodology/approach -Four similar robotic cleaning systems are designed for a reversed cone-shape glass facade at the top of the control tower. One system is composed of a robot moving along and cleaning the facade, and an automatic conveyer positioning, securing, supplying energy and water to, and recycling the dirty water from the robot. An on-board controller enables the system to work in a remote control mode or a fully automated mode under the supervision of an operator. Findings -This paper presents how to integrate the attaching, moving, cleaning and securing functions into one robotic system for the high rise glass facade, and focuses on the kinematics, the control and sensor system and the cleaning navigation. In particular, the real time control method of the vacuum in the cup is discussed to ensure high cleaning quality and security. Research limitations/implications -Since the cleaning system proposed in this paper is a custom-built one, the generalization of its design idea should be tested in other applications. Practical implications -The paper includes the implications for the development of automatic cleaning system for the high-rise buildings with reversed inclining glass façade. Originality/value -The robotic cleaning system described in this paper is the first fully automated cleaning machine for the reversed inclining glass facade in China. It works effectively and reliably on the control tower of the Guangzhou airport.

This paper presents a method for computing the visual odometry of ground vehicles. By mounting a downward-looking camera on the vehicle, it can recover the motion of the vehicle only by using the video input. Different from other feature based algorithms, the key technique deployed in this system is an appearance-based approach -template matching. A rotated template matching approach is used for motion estimation. For each two consecutive images captured from the camera, an image patch is first selected from the first image, and then the image patch is rotated by every angle within a predefined range and matched against the second image. The best result from the matching indicates both the position translation and heading changes. For performance evaluation, this algorithm is tested on the indoor granite surface. In the end, we give a comparison of the result between wheel odometry and visual odometry.