A Four-legged Wall-climbing Robot Based On Claws

The creatures in nature can climb freely on the vertical surface with claws of the foot-end and exploit strong mechanical interlocking between claws and spines of legs for freely climbing on the inverted surface.This unique ability can be applied to the field of wall-climbing robots to improve the performance of wall-climbing robots.The wall-climbing robots based on claws as an important branch of special robots have many excellent features,such as low power consumption,low noise,stable adhesion,easy desorption and so on,and have a strong ability to adapt to the rough,irregular,dusty surface in nature.In this paper,a wall-climbing robot based on claws was designed learning from creatures' outstanding ability of climbing and adhesion.Firstly,the attachment model of the claw and the rough surface was established,and the factors affecting the attachment ability of the claw on the rough surface were studied to understand the way creatures attach.Based on the referenced design principle of foot with claws,the flexible pads with claws were designed with simple locking method,which is different from the multi-material spine mechanism introduced by Stanford University.The excellent performance of the flexible pads with claws was verified by experiment.Based on the attachment model of the flexible pads with claws and combining the creeping posture and gait usually used by creatures climbing on the vertical surface,the body structure,creeping gait and efficient foot trajectory of four-legged wall-climbing robot based on claws were designed.The design we proposed was verified in the form of simulation.The robot control system was developed on the principle of safety,high efficiency and simplicity.The communication between the upper computer and robot is used to monitor the running state of the robot.The control precision of the robot is improved by feedback control.Finally,the adaptability to different rough surface,the maximum speed and load of robot we designed were tested by experiment.It is proved that the robot could realize the basic functions,such as forward,backward,turn and so on,and the PC feedback control is reliable and effective.