A miniaturized wall-climbing segment robot inspired by caterpillar locomotion

Abstract

Caterpillars are very successful soft-bodied climbers that navigate in complex environments. This paper develops a multi-segmented robot climbing on vertical surfaces using dry adhesive pads, inspired by caterpillar locomotion. The miniaturized robot consists of four segments, and each segment uses a solenoid actuator with a permanent magnet plunger. The head and body segments adapt a novel mechanism and Scott-Russell linkages to generate a bi-directional plane motion using one solenoid actuator, resulting to reliable attaching and peeling motions of gecko pads. A tail is also attached at the back of the last segment to avoid falling or exhibiting unstable motion. Gecko-inspired adhesive pads are fabricated from polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) with the area of 20 mm × 10 mm. We have conducted experiments on the locomotion performance of the segment robot climbing vertical surfaces for two types of locomotion, achieving the fast and stable climbing motion.

iCrawl: An Inchworm-Inspired Crawling Robot

“…Figure 12 provides a comparative view of various worm-like robots and their properties as well as performance parameters. [11], (iv) in [12], (v) in [13], (vi) in [14], (vii) in [15], (viii) in [15], and (ix) in [18], whereas (x) is our robot which is presented in this paper.…”

“…Two modular caterpillar-inspired wall climbing robots were developed by [12] to perform crawling on a flat surface using passive suckers for surface attachment. While another caterpillar-inspired wall climbing robot demonstrated climbing with the use of its four body segments; each with a solenoid actuator and permanent magnet plunger [13]. The robot used polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) geckoinspired pads for attachment of the head and body segments.…”

“…To summarize, existing worm-like or other similar robots have mainly targeted flat surfaces (horizontal crawling or vertical climbing) [11], [13], [15], [23]- [25], [27], [28], [31], [32] (see also discussion section) or in-pipe locomotion [33]- [35]. Outer-curved surface crawlers relied on gripping mechanisms to demonstrate crawling behavior while also indicating their grippers' fixed grasping range [11], [25], [26].…”

Optimization Design and Flexible Detection Method of Wall-Climbing Robot System with Multiple Sensors Integration for Magnetic Particle Testing

“…Dai et al [15] and Yin et al [16] successively carried out research on pipeline weld defect detection technology and developed robots for pipeline non-destructive testing, whose work efficiency can be improved in the following research. Several compound mobile mechanisms have been innovatively designed to improve the wall adaptability of a wall-climbing robot, but the conflict between movement flexibility and safe adsorption has not been well resolved [17][18][19]. Several researchers carried detection sensors and cleaning equipment on a wall-climbing robot and developed a series of ship detection and cleaning robots [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27].…”

Research on Kinematics and Stability of a Bionic Wall-Climbing Hexapod Robot

“…With the development of robot technology, the application of robot has not been limited to the industrial field and gradually moved to more fields, such as service [1], medical treatment [2], and cleaning [3]. Wall-climbing robot as a bionic robot which movement flexibility, a variety of irregular terrain adaptability, and can cross obstacles, which can be widely used in the fields of building, traffic and disaster relief to complete testing, flaw detection, cleaning, rescue and other operations [4, 5].…”