Climbing Robots with Adaptive Grippers for Construction

Climbing robots are intended to move over vertical and slope surfaces to fulfill different technological operation by means on-board equipment. Vertical surfaces of buildings can be porous and rough so the robot should perform adaptation to such kinds of surfaces. The paper presents a new climbing robot for construction tasks that has adaptive possibility to move over various surfaces by means of a vacuum adaptive gripper system. It includes pressure, flow and force sensors, sealing gripper design and feedback control system of pedipulators. The control system ensures a sealing mode of adaptive pedipulator motion. The robot has two platforms and a light skeleton structure with nine degrees of freedom including two flexible technological manipulators. The climbing robot design allows adaptation to vertical surfaces of different quality. The design of the robot, its technical characteristics and experimental results are discussed.