Adaptive impedance control of a cleaning unit for a novel wall-climbing mobile robotic platform (ROPE RIDE)

This paper presents a new position-based adaptive impedance control (PAIC) scheme of a cleaning unit for a novel wall-climbing mobile robotic platform (ROPE RIDE), which can climb up a high-rise building with the help of a rope ascender and two propellers thrusters. To guarantee the cleaning performance of proposed ROPE RIDE, it is crucial to maintain a constant contact force between a cleaning unit and various types of walls. Compared to existing impedance control methods, the proposed PAIC method is not only simple to implement but also robust against external disturbances such as the varying wall positions and materials. Therefore, it can promise the zero steady state force tracking error even for a step-type wall. The extensive experiments in addition to simulations are performed to validate the cleaning performance as well as the stability of proposed adaptive impedance control scheme.