Path Planning Strategy of Autonomous Climbing Robot for Inspection Applications in Construction

Abstract

The construction sector has a large number of highly dangerous manual operations related to inspection, assembly and maintenance. A significant part of these operations takes place in large scale environments formed by metallic structures. Specially developed self-supported robots have been introduced for this purpose during the last years. This paper deals with the autonomous climbing robot ROMA which uses the "insect" concept to climb in a complex 3D metallic-based structure. Robot needs to inspect in the structure all the beams, columns and its joints. This is why one of the crucial problems is to optimise the robot energy consumption during this inspection. The minimum energy TSPlike path planning algorithm and return-to-start algorithm are also presented in the paper.