Development of a Wall-Climbing Drone Capable of Vertical Soft Landing Using a Tilt-Rotor Mechanism

Abstract

Wall-climbing drones have many applications, including structural health monitoring of civil structures, such as bridges and high-rise buildings, cleaning of solar panels to improve power generation efficiency, and airplane visual inspections. For these applications, the drone requires a high-payload capacity, and consequently the size and weight of the drone increase. The drone also should not damage the target structures considering the purpose of its mission. Our previous versions of a wall-climbing drone could have high-impact force on the surface where the drone perches and on the platform itself because of the impact caused by a fast pose change and landing speed. In order to overcome this potential risk, a mechanism and a control algorithm for perching on a vertical surface through low-speed pose change are proposed in this paper. The drone platform is based on an X-configuration quadcopter, and a tilt-rotor mechanism is incorporated into the two axes, such that the front thrusters and the rear thrusters are paired. The vertical soft landing mechanism using the tilt-rotors is validated by the experimental tests of the prototype.

Review of Non-Destructive Civil Infrastructure Evaluation for Bridges: State-of-the-Art Robotic Platforms, Sensors and Algorithms

“…Some of the recent studies have also focused towards developing hybrid robotic frameworks (e.g., wall-climbing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), robots capable of flying and crawling and other multi-rotor flying robots capable of latching on to specific parts of infrastructure that require inspection), which are able to provide multi-functional roles and capabilities for the different types of inspection activities [ 43 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 , 85 ]. A number of different types of robots (e.g., flying robots, walking robots, sliding robots, climbing robots, and underwater diving robots) have been leveraged for the SHM and NDE of bridges in order to gain access to different parts of the bridges.…”

“…The majority of the studies for bridge inspection using UAVs rely on visual inspection methods [ 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 ]. However, some of the recent studies have attempted to explore different ways in which aerial robots can be modified to provide perching and contact-based inspection capabilities [ 45 , 78 , 82 , 84 ]. A number of recent studies have also proposed the development of hybrid robots, which are able to provide multiple functionalities (e.g., flying and walking mechanisms and a number of different flying and contact-based approaches) [ 43 , 81 , 82 ].…”

Fully-Actuated Aerial Manipulator for Infrastructure Contact Inspection: Design, Modeling, Localization, and Control

“…This solution opens the spectrum of applications that can be accomplished because the end effector of the manipulator can be designed for a specific use case, such as sensor installation [ 23 ], hammering tasks [ 24 ], deflection measurements [ 25 ], and others. The third approach is about using a morphing platform or a more complex robot with the capability of moving along the infrastructure, maintaining the contact with the surface [ 26 , 27 ]. Nevertheless, although the last two approaches seem to be more versatile, the required positioning accuracy of the robot and the requirements in the measurement collection process are, again, very difficult to reach while flying and sensor installation usually requires a controlled force while the glue is curing to grant the adhesion of the device to the surface.…”

Design and Analysis of a Novel Tree Climbing Robot Mechanism

“…Climbing robotics is a research field growing rapidly with primary focuses on the prototype design, development of climbing robots and applications. As the robotic technology constantly advances, climbing robots show promising application prospects in the fields of tree pruning [1], fruit picking [2] and high building cleaning [3][4]. Many scholars have carried out extensive research, in these application fields [5].…”