Development of a wall-climbing robot with biped-wheel hybrid locomotion mechanism

This paper presents a wall-climbing robot for reconnaissance in anti-hijacking application. A novel biped-wheel hybrid locomotion mechanism is proposed, which is composed of a planetary gear train, a vacuum adhesion module and a negative pressure adhesion module. The bipedal, wheeled and hybrid locomotion modes are analyzed respectively. A prototype of the wall-climbing robot with compact size and low power consumption has been developed and a lot of performance tests have been conducted. The experimental results demonstrate that the wall-climbing robot has such characteristics as fast moving speed, excellent surface adaptability and obstacle negotiation capability.