Designing And Development Of Magnetic Wall Climbing Device In Power Station

CATEGORY: ROBOTICS
Mechanica Confab, Vol. 2, No. 2, February-March 2013
Designing And Development Of Magnetic Wall Climbing Device In Power Station
Sanjay Nishane, Ajay Kale
Abstract
Climbing is a challenging task for autonomous mobile robots primarily due to requirements for agile locomotion and high maneuverability as well as robust and efficient attachment and detachment. Many external, environmental conditions that have a critical need for automation, gives rise to need of robotics. The exploitation of wall-climbing robots has broad prospect undoubtedly. The potential is enormous for wall-climbing robots which can work in almost all environments; however, with the limits of many factors, the application is rather limited. Such robots could, among other applications, be used to inspect the hulls of spacecraft for damage, leakages in oil refineries, their stickiness ensuring that they would stay attached. The wall climbing device must be flexible and should have accurate dimensions so as to reach the specific height and perform the given task. CAD software will be used for modeling of such designs.
Introduction
Interest in the development of climbing systems has grown rapidly in recent years. Climbing devices are very useful that can be adopted in a variety of applications such as maintenance, building, inspection, and safety, mainly in the process and construction industries. These systems are mainly adopted in places where direct access by a human operator is very expensive, because of the need for scaffolding or special structures or situation is very dangerous due to the presence of a hostile environment. The main motivation for its use is to increase the operation efficiency, eliminate the costly assembly of scaffolding and to protect human health and safety in hazardous tasks. Several climbing devices have already been developed, and others are under development, for applications ranging from cleaning to inspection of difficult to reach constructions. A wall-climbing device should not only be light, so that it may reduce excessive adhesion forces, but also have large payload in order to carry instrumentations and ancillary equipment, for the tasks it is designed, during navigation.
The device proposed to be developed in this project makes use of permanent magnets which are alternately magnetized to cause advancement of the main frame in steps. Actuation of magnet is controlled pneumatically with compact pneumatic cylinders attached to the main frame.
Recently various robots have been designed for wall cleaning and maintenance. There are three kinds of kinematics for the motion on smooth vertical surfaces: multiple legs, a sliding frame and a wheeled and chain-track vehicle. Four different principles of adhesion which are vacuum suckers, negative pressure, propellers and grasping are also used by climbing robots. Since 1996 the group at the Robotics Institute of BeiHang University has developed a series of autonomous climbing robots with sliding frames for glass-wall cleaning. In this paper, the individual robot’s mechanical constructions and unique aspects are introduced in detail.
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