Development of a Steel Bridge Climbing Robot

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel tank-like steel bridge climbing robot capable of navigating various structural shapes and surfaces, with comprehensive analysis and successful field testing demonstrating its effectiveness.

Contribution

A new tank-like robot design with reciprocating mechanism and roller-chains for climbing diverse steel structures, including analysis and field validation.

Findings

Successfully climbs on different structural shapes

Demonstrates stable adhesion and climbing in field tests

Provides a framework for future steel climbing robot design

Abstract

Motivated by a high demand for automated inspection of civil infrastructure, this work presents a new design and development of a tank-like robot for structural health monitoring. Unlike most existing magnetic wheeled mobile robot designs, which may be suitable for climbing on flat steel surface, our proposed tank-like robot design uses reciprocating mechanism and roller-chains to make it capable of climbing on different structural shapes (e.g., cylinder, cube) with coated or non-coated steel surfaces. The proposed robot is able to transition from one surface to the other (e.g., from flat surface to curving surface). Taking into account of several strict considerations (including tight dimension, efficient adhesion and climbing flexibility) to adapt with various shapes of steel structures, a prototype tank-like robot incorporating multiple sensors (hall-effects, sonars, inertial measurement unit and camera), has been developed. Rigorous analysis of robot kinematics, adhesion force, sliding failure and turn-over failure has been conducted to demonstrate the stability of the proposed design. Mechanical and magnetic force analysis together with sliding/turn-over failure investigation can serve as an useful framework for designing various steel climbing robots in the future. Experimental results and field deployments confirm the adhesion and climbing capability of the developed robot.