Design and Experiment of a Novel Façade Cleaning Robot with a Biped Mechanism

Abstract

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.

Special Feature on Advanced Mobile Robotics

“…Glass façade is a challenging problem, since frames between glass panels become barriers for a cleaning robot, degrading the performance of area coverage. Nansai et al [41] presented a new style of façade cleaning robot with a biped mechanism with active suction system.…”

Modeling and control of a novel facade cleaning robot with four-ducted fan drive

“…It contains key technologies with facade adsorption, designs of lifting device, and related control methods. Facade adsorption technologies for glass curtain walls include the passive sucker, [1][2][3] the active sucker, 4,5 the thrust adsorption by using fans, [6][7][8][9] and so on. Lifting technologies include rope driven, 6,8,9 leg types, 4 wheel types, 3,7 and sliding frame types.…”

“…Facade adsorption technologies for glass curtain walls include the passive sucker, [1][2][3] the active sucker, 4,5 the thrust adsorption by using fans, [6][7][8][9] and so on. Lifting technologies include rope driven, 6,8,9 leg types, 4 wheel types, 3,7 and sliding frame types. 1,2,5 The wall-climbing robots used to clean have been studied in recent decades, but there is no mass-produced commercial products for glass curtain wall cleaning, and the existing research work is mostly focused on structural designs.…”

A Pressing Attachment Approach for a Wall-Climbing Robot Utilizing Passive Suction Cups

“…Nevertheless, considering the noise and light weight of the robot, passive suction cups are expected to be used for weight minimization of wall-climbing robots. Considering the locomotion mechanism, wall-climbing robots can also be classified into four types, which are legged [21], wheeled [22], cable-driven [23], and tracked belt [10,16,24]. Each locomotion mechanism has its advantages and disadvantages.…”

“…Each locomotion mechanism has its advantages and disadvantages. For instance, legged locomotion can move over cracks and avoid obstacles [21]. However, the legged wall-climbing robot requires motors drive and coordinate the legs.…”