Development of vertically moving robot with gripping handrails for fire fighting

Abstract

Since there are many high-rise condominiums, ladder tracks are used against high-rise building fire. However, their height is much higher than the reachable height of the ladders. On the other hand, there have been some studies of vertically moving robots by means of suckers on walls. However, their climbing speed and reliability are not enough for use in an actual fire fighting operation. Therefore, we propose a vertically moving robot which utilizes a balcony handrail as a step. We designed and made a full-size trial robot. We built up the dynamic model of the robot, and planned desired trajectories for the robot. Furthermore we designed a hybrid control system that consists of nonlinear feedback and a sequential method. We concluded that the vertically moving robot is useful for fire fighting against high-rise condominiums from the results of experiments.