3D REALTIME SIMULATION FRAMEWORK FOR WALL-CLIMBING ROBOTS - TOWARDS THE NEW CLIMBING ROBOT CREA

Simulation frameworks are common tools to test new algorithms or to analyze the behavior of a robot before executing the control software on the real machine. This tremendously reduces time and effort during the development process. This paper presents a component based framework for simulating different wall-climbing robots that use negative pressure adhesion in combination with a drive system. Key aspect of the simulation is the vacuum adhesion system: Surface characteristics and features in the environment influence its overall performance, which is calculated based on a thermodynamic model of the airflows. The framework tremendously improves the development process of the new wall-climbing robot CREA by the possibility to validate controllers and algorithms offline and in realtime beforehand.