A climbing autonomous robot for inspection applications in 3D complex environments

Abstract

SUMMARYOften inspection and maintenance work involve a large number of highly dangerous manual operations, especially within industrial fields such as shipbuilding and construction. This paper deals with the autonomous climbing robot which uses the "caterpillar" concept to climb in complex 3D metallic-based structures. During its motion the robot generates in real-time the path and grasp planning in order to ensure stable self-support to avoid the environment obstacles, and to optimise the robot consumption during the inspection. The control and monitoring of the robot is achieved through an advanced Graphical User Interface to allow an effective and user friendly operation of the robot. The experiments confirm its advantages in executing the inspection operations.

Multi-Step Motion Planning for Free-Climbing Robots

“…Such robots need not incorporate special fixtures or tools, nor need they be designed specifically for climbing, as have previous climbing robots (e.g., [2,3,11,16,17,25]). Their flexibility could benefit several application areas, including search-and-rescue, surveillance, and planetary exploration.…”

Towards Penetration-based Clawed Climbing

“…The majority of efforts to develop climbing robots have been for urban settings with smooth glass or metal surfaces where suction and magnetic approaches to generating adhesion are possible. Some examples of robots that have used a suction based approach include [8,10,15]; some magnetic based climbers include [2,13]. A few robots have also addressed climbing on rough rock surfaces, employing strong grips capable of sustaining tensile and shear loads [3,4].…”

New heuristic algorithms for the windy rural postman problem

“…Note that the solutions are really cycles. Therefore, if the new solution has not been completed when we arrive to element j m , we continue the inspection of the second solution starting now from j 1 . Similarly, starting with the segment {i q+1 , .…”