A Tethered Facade Cleaning Robot Based on a Dual Rope Windlass Climbing Mechanism: Design and Experiments

Cleaning tasks for vertical structures, such as building facades and walls on construction sites, are dangerous; there is a high risk of fall accidents among workers engaged in such tasks. Hence, research on the automation of wall-cleaning tasks based on robotics technology has been actively conducted in recent years. However, existing wall-cleaning robots have limitations, such as poor mobility performance or the need for additional infrastructure for operation. In this article, we designed a novel rope-driven wall-cleaning robot Edelstro-M2 with two innovative characteristics. First, both vertical and horizontal movements on the wall are possible by implementing a dual rope climbing mechanism and parallel kinematics. Second, except for a rope fixing arrangement, additional infrastructure, such as winch and building management unit systems, is not required for operation. A prototype model was developed, and real-world experiments were conducted to verify the mobility and cleaning performance of the robot. In the experiment, the robot was controlled by manual remote control. We plan to study automatic control of the robot in the future works.