A Technological Survey on Wall Climbing Robot

摘要

Tall buildings and hazardous utilities require regular inspection and maintenance to comply with the ordinance, and to ensure the integrity and safety. The traditional manual inspection and maintenance on tall building normally requires the installation of expensive scaffoldings or gondolas in which human operators need to work in mid-air and life threatening environment. The prospect of climbing robots is popular because they can take the place of humans to carry out hazardous and maintenance job such as cleaning glass surfaces of skyscrapers, fire rescue, and inspection of pipes and wall, cleaning & inspection of high rise buildings, evaluation and diagnosis of a storage tank in nuclear power plants & petrochemical plants, maintenance of ship, aircraft wing inspection with the consideration of operational efficiency, safety and human health. These types of climbing robots are classified in to different groups based on their locomotion and adhesion mechanism. Due to the ability to relieve human beings from these hazardous works, more & more people are interested in developing various service climbing robots in recent years.