Tankbot: A Palm-size, Tank-like Climbing Robot using Soft Elastomer Adhesive Treads

Abstract

In this paper we propose a tank-like climbing robot, called Tankbot, using flat (non-patterned) and soft elastomer adhesive treads. This wheeled climbing robot design enables continuous, vibration-free, and strong attachment to wide range of smooth and rough surfaces, relatively fast and smooth motion, and improved capability to traverse obstacles and to carry high payloads. Tankbot is lightweight (60—150 g) and can climb on any slope from 0• to 360• on smooth surfaces. Moreover, climbing vertically up, down, and laterally on relatively rough surfaces, such as a wooden door, a painted wall, and a brick wall, is also possible. A passive or active tail is added to Tankbot to transfer the peeling force to the front wheel and to assist for transitioning to different surface slopes. It is shown that the normal component of the peeling force with respect to the surface is crucial and has to be maximized to maximize the climbing stability. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the tread tension should be in a specific range to maximize the normal peeling force. With the aid of the derived models, different Tankbot prototypes with different body and tread dimensions are manufactured and tested for different tasks. It is shown that a 115 g Tankbot can carry up to 300 g on a regular painted wall. Tankbot can go over obstacles of up to 16 mm in diameter, perform both internal and external vertical wall to ceiling transitions, steer in two dimensions with a minimum turning diameter of 80 cm, and loiter on painted walls for up to 5 min.

Controllable load sharing for soft adhesive interfaces on three-dimensional surfaces

“…Therefore, the concept of our soft adhesion system can provide significant benefits in a broad range of adhesion applications requiring high adhesion on various sizes of 3D surfaces. This includes transferprinting systems (14, 50-52) and robotic manipulators (15) capable of handling a wide range of sizes and curvatures of rigid and deformable substrates as well as mobile robots that can climb on complex 3D surfaces, such as aircraft, space shuttle, or pipe surfaces (9,53,54).…”

STRIDE II: A Water Strider-inspired Miniature Robot with Circular Footpads

“…Hence, the area occupied by all the wire-legs is calculated as 11340 mm 2 , which means the unit area needed to carry 1 gram would be 756 mm 2 . On the other hand, the footpad design for STRIDE II has a lift force of 55 grams for a total of 12 footpads, where the occupied area is computed to be 16625 mm 2 , which means that the unit area needed to carry 1 gram would be 302 mm 2 .…”

“…The research on biologically-inspired robotics both helps researchers to understand the dynamics of animals and gives us an idea for possible solutions that can be implemented to overcome challenging robotic locomotion problems [1]. Several examples of recent bio-inspired robotic locomotion works at the small-scale include gecko-inspired wall climbing robots [2][3][4][5][6], cockroach-inspired legged running robots [7], hummingbird-inspired flying robots with flapping wings [8,9], and basilisk lizard-inspired water surface running robots [10].…”

A Crawler Climbing Robot Integrating Electroadhesion and Electrostatic Actuation

“…With the sticky force of soft elastomer, a palm-sized climbing robot in a crawler configuration can climb on different materials. [13] This paper focuses on another promising adhesion method, which is electroadhesion. It works based on the attraction force between the opposite electric charges in an adhesive pad and a substrate [14][15][16][17].…”