Design and Development of a Climbing Robot for Wind Turbine Maintenance

Abstract

The evolution of the wind turbine to generate carbon-free renewable energy is rapidly growing. Thus, performing maintenance and inspection tasks in high altitude environments or difficult to access places, and even bad weather conditions, poses a problem for the periodic inspection process of the wind turbine industry. This paper describes the design and development of a scaled-down prototype climbing robot for wind turbine maintenance to perform critical tower operations. Thus, the unique feature of this maintenance robot is the winding mechanism, which uses a tension force to grip on the tower surface without falling to the ground either in static or dynamic situations, with the locomotion to perform a straight up–down motion in a circular truncated cone and the stability to work at significant heights. The robot computer-aided design (CAD) model of the mechanical mechanism, force and structural analysis, and the testing of the prototype model, are addressed in this paper. The key hardware developments that were utilized to build a low-cost, reliable and compact climbing robot are the embedded microprocessors, brushed DC motors, stepper motors and steel rope. This paper concludes with a successful preliminary experiment of a scaled down prototype proving the functionality of the concept. The potential applications for this robot are industrial maintenance, inspection and exploration, security and surveillance, cleaning, painting, and welding at extreme height conditions.

The Kinematic Analysis of a Wind Turbine Climbing Robot Mechanism

“…The tower has a height of 1200 mm which has been adopted from a real 2 MW wind turbine which has a height of around 78,000 mm. The design of the wind turbine climbing robot consists of three parts: the driving mechanism, winding mechanism, and body frame is quite similar to what was demonstrated in [10] the first prototype. The second prototype addresses maneuverability and stability, resolving some of the issues that emerge in the first prototype.…”

Inspection of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines Using Multi-Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Literature Review and Trends

“…Figure 6 shows the existing mainstream FOWT inspection methods, including manual [84][85][86], permanent sensors [60,87], ROV [88][89][90], climbing robot [91,92], UAV [93,94], and so on. The grayed rectangular areas represent sufficient research and successful commercial application examples in this field, while the elliptical areas with filled color represent that this field is receiving increasing attention and the research heat is rising.…”

“…They employ a variety of locomotion modalities, such as climbing and sliding. Liu et al [92] presented the design and development of a climbing robot for wind turbine inspection and maintenance featuring a unique winding mechanism that allows it to grip the tower surface securely, enabling it to work at significant heights and withstand static and dynamic conditions. Nonetheless, the utilization of these robots necessitates intricate mechanical designs and intricate analysis of dynamics.…”