No abstract

Abstract:In recent decades, skyscrapers, as represented by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and Shanghai Tower in Shanghai, have been built due to the improvements of construction technologies. Even in such newfangled skyscrapers, the façades are generally cleaned by humans. Wall climbing robots, which are capable of climbing up vertical surfaces, ceilings and roofs, are expected to replace the manual workforce in façade cleaning works, which is both hazardous and laborious work. Such tasks require these robotic platforms to possess high levels of adaptability and flexibility. This paper presents a detailed review of wall climbing robots categorizing them into six distinct classes based on the adhesive mechanism that they use. This paper concludes by expanding beyond adhesive mechanisms by discussing a set of desirable design attributes of an ideal glass façade cleaning robot towards facilitating targeted future research with clear technical goals and well-defined design trade-off boundaries.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Legged robots are able to move across irregular terrains and those based on 1-degree-of-freedom planar linkages can be energy efficient, but are often constrained by a limited range of gaits which can limit their locomotion capabilities considerably. This article reports the design of a novel reconfigurable Theo Jansen linkage that produces a wide variety of gait cycles, opening new possibilities for innovative applications. The suggested mechanism switches from a pin-jointed Grübler kinematic chain to a 5-degree-of-freedom mechanism with slider joints during the reconfiguration process. It is shown that such reconfigurable linkage significantly extend the capabilities of the original design, while maintaining its mechanical simplicity during normal operation, to not only produce different useful gait patterns but also to realize behaviors beyond locomotion. Experiments with an implemented prototype are presented, and their results validate the proposed approach.

Façade cleaning in high-rise buildings has always been considered a hazardous task when carried out by labor forces. Even though numerous studies have focused on the development of glass façade cleaning systems, the available technologies in this domain are limited and their performances are broadly affected by the frames that connect the glass panels. These frames generally act as a barrier for the glass façade cleaning robots to cross over from one glass panel to another, which leads to a performance degradation in terms of area coverage. We present a new class of façade cleaning robot with a biped mechanism that is able overcome these obstacles to maximize its area coverage. The developed robot uses active suction cups to adhere to glass walls and adopts mechanical linkage to navigate the glass surface to perform cleaning. This research addresses the design challenges in realizing the developed robot. Its control system consists of inverse kinematics, a fifth polynomial interpolation, and sequential control. Experiments were conducted in a real scenario, and the results indicate that the developed robot achieves significantly higher coverage performance by overcoming both negative and positive obstacles in a glass panel.

Abstract:The façade cleaning of high rise buildings is one of the hazardous tasks that is performed by human operators. Even after a significant advancement in construction technologies, several newfangled skyscrapers are still using the manual method for cleaning the glass panels. This research is aimed at the development of a glass façade cleaning robot, capable of adapting to any kind of building architecture. A robotic system capable of cleaning vertical glass surfaces demands a transformable morphology. A self-reconfigurable robot is one of the potential solutions to realize high degrees of adaptability. Following the design principles we derived, we propose a nested reconfigurable design approach for glass façade cleaning and develope a system of robot modules that performs glass façade cleaning. Throughout this research article, we discuss the brief concept and scheme of nested reconfigurable design principle and the hardware-software challenges associated with it. This article also discusses the capability to maximize the flexibility and modularity of the robot by using intra-and inter-reconfigurations. The effectiveness of the designed system is verified by experimental means.