Suction Based Wall Climbing Robot for Edge Movement

The intelligent mobile robot with sensors and image processing embedded system combines the suction and aerodynamic attraction to achieve good balance between strong adhesion force and high mobility for the purpose of the warehouse inspection. To be able to move across the edge region, the new robot is designed to connect two robot modules with the waist joint made of strong motor. The height and weight of the robot main body was reduced to improve the suction forces by the physical analysis. It also implements object detection ability using effective color transform and segmentation technique for the exact target detection on the wall using a embedded camera system, communication module and several active sensors. Experimental results showed that the robot can move upward on the wall at the speed of 3.4 m/min and carry 10 kg payload in addition to 2.5 kg self-weight, which record the highest payload capacity among climbing robots of similar size.