Cy‐mag^3D: a simple and miniature climbing robot with advance mobility in ferromagnetic environment

Abstract

Cy-mag 3D is a miniature climbing robot with advanced mobility and magnetic adhesion. It is very compact: a cylindrical shape with 28 mm of diameter and 62 mm of width. Its design is very simple: two wheels, hence two degrees of freedom, and an advanced magnetic circuit. Despite its simplicity, Cy-mag 3D has an amazing mobility on ferromagnetic sheets. From an horizontal sheet, it can make transition to almost any intersecting sheet from 10 • to 360 • -we baptise the last one surface flip. It passes inner and outer straight corners in any almost inclination of the gravity. Cy-mag 3D opens new possibilities to use mobile robots for industrial inspection with stringent size limitations, as found in generators. A patent is pending on this system.

Highly compact robots for inspection of power plants

“…A fourth solution consists of having the magnets attached to the robot body, without other points of contact to the ground [Figure 8(e)]. This solution has been implemented in the Cy‐mag 3D robot (Rochat et al, 2011) presented in Section 3.2.7.…”

“…To have some flexible mobility, the magnets in the robot body have to be placed in a smart way. This is the case of Cy‐mag 3D (Rochat et al, 2011) with magnets fixed to the body but placed inside the two wheels (see Figure 17). The robot has no other contact point to the ground, and thus the body automatically keeps upright, somehow balanced over the ferromagnetic underlying surface.…”

“…In this particular case the laser scanner required a particular integration effort. Much smaller but integrating fewer sensors, the Cy‐mag 3D (Rochat et al, 2011), the Tripillar (Rochat et al, 2009a), and the Tubulo (Schoeneich et al, 2010) have motors, mechanics, control, communication, and also energy embedded. The Tubulo robot is the most compact complete system among them, integrating, for visual inspection purpose, a camera.…”

Analysis of the Vertical Driving Performance of Multiple Connected Pipe-Climbing Microrobots with Magnetic Wheels

“…Wall-climbing microrobots have been developed for applications in small spaces such as for the inspection of small pipes in power generation plants [10,11,12]. Since configuring a complex mechanism with wall-climbing microrobots is difficult, two methods have mainly been used for adhesion to walls: the biologically inspired adhesion method [13,14] and the magnetic wheel method [10,11,12,15,16]. Greuter et al developed a 40 mm × 43 mm × 14 mm crawler-type wall-climbing microrobot using silicone rubber [13].…”

MultiTrack: A multi-linked track robot with suction adhesion for climbing and transition

“…As Tables 1 and 2 show, five types of adhesion technologies (magnetic [13,14], pneumatic [15,16], mechanical [17], electrostatic [1,18,19], and chemical adhesion [20][21][22]) and six types of locomotion mechanisms (legs [23], wheels [24,25], tracks [26], slides [27], wires [7], and multi-linked modules [28][29][30]) were compared. A + or − marker means that the selected type was suitable or unsuitable, respectively, for use in meeting a particular requirement.…”