Magnetic Wheeled Climbing Robot: Design and Implementation
This paper presents a climbing robot, with wheeled locomotion and adhesion through permanent magnets. This machine was developed to be used in the inspection of several types of man-made ferromagnetic structures, such as towers for wind turbines, fuel sto
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Magnetic Wheeled Climbing Robot: Design and Implementation M.F. Silva, R.S. Barbosa, and A.L.C. Oliveira
Abstract This paper presents a climbing robot, with wheeled locomotion and adhesion through permanent magnets. This machine was developed to be used in the inspection of several types of man-made ferromagnetic structures, such as towers for wind turbines, fuel storage tanks, ship hulls, etc., in order to, for instance, detect weaknesses due to corrosion. In this article are presented the main aspects taken into consideration for its design, as well as several constructive aspects, among which are detailed its mechanical and electrical construction, the implemented control architecture and the Human-Machine Interface (HMI) for its control. The distinguishing characteristic of this robot is its dynamic adjustment system of the permanent magnets to assure the machine adhesion to the surfaces when crossing slightly irregular and curved surfaces with a large radius.
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Introduction
The interest in the development of climbing robots has grown rapidly in recent years, since these devices can be adopted in varied applications such as maintenance, building, inspection and safety, mainly in the process and construction industries. They are mainly adopted in places where direct access by humans is expensive, because of the need for scaffolding or special structures, or dangerous, due to the presence of a hostile environment. The main motivations for its use are to increase the operation efficiency, by eliminating the costly assembly of scaffolding, or to protect human health and safety in hazardous tasks. Several climbing robots
M.F. Silva (*) • R.S. Barbosa • A.L.C. Oliveira Departamento de Engenharia Electrote´cnica, GECAD – Grupo de Engenharia do Conhecimento e Apoio a` Decisa˜o, ISEP – Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Rua Dr. Anto´nio Bernardino de Almeida, Porto 4200-072 Porto, Portugal e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] A. Madureira et al. (eds.), Computational Intelligence and Decision Making: Trends and 301 Applications, Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering 61, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4722-7_28, # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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have been developed, and others are under development, for applications ranging from cleaning to inspection of difficult to reach constructions [1]. Magnetic adhesion is a principle adopted for the creation of an adhesion force, in cases where the surface allows it, and it can be highly desirable due to its inherent reliability. This method is fast but, depending on the weight of the robot, may involve the use of heavy actuators to obtain the required adhesion force [1]. It is possible to use electromagnets [2] or permanent magnets for assuring the robot adhesion to surfaces, combined with the use of wheels (as in this case) or tracks to move [3]. The main advantages of using permanent magnets is that there is no need to spend energy in the adhesion process, the robot does not
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