You would rather hesitate to do the inspection and maintenance in a typically dangerous environment like the exterior of a tall building or a nuclear facility and pray to God to provide for someone else to do the same. Well, consider your prayers answered! A wall climbing Robot is willing to go through the trouble so that you can still keep smiling!
But, the idea of developing a wall climbing robot is always held back by the mighty force of GRAVITY!
And BEWARE. This won’t be an Easy Project for you. But this definitely is a fantastic Mechanical Engineering Seminar Topic, especially if you can demonstrate how it defies gravity.
You need to move against gravity to accomplish the task. Adhesion is what is required primarily, to help keep the robot firmly on to the wall. Reliable adhesion is a major factor in developing a WCR. Once a proper suction is obtained, locomotion is the next step. It is also equally important to keep the weight as low as possible so that the effort to stick on to the wall is quite low.
Adhesion is achieved by making use of
- Suction cups
Suction cups offer excellent grip (almost upto 1 atm). But, the negative aspect of using a suction cup is that it needs a vacuum pump. Since the vacuum pump is bulky and has high power consumption it is rather difficult to accommodate one in a WCR. Moreover, a suction cup would find itself useless when trying to stick to a rough surface.
2. Electrostatic chuck (ESC)
ESC achieves controlled adhesion by means of electrostatic forces.
Mobility is achieved by making use of an electric motor.
With these things in mind, I hope you would have got an insight of the Wall Climbing Robot.
Ref: http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-software/wallclimbing-robot-spies
AIMES, Srinivas Integrated Campus,Mukka 