Adhesion-adaptive control of a novel bridge-climbing robot

In view of the present situation of bridge inspection equipment, a novel bridge inspection method is proposed and a wall-climbing robot based on negative pressure adhesion mechanism with adaptive control is developed. To meet the bridge inspection requirements, the developed robot consists of adhesion module, movement module, control module and crack detect module. The rough bridge wall environment is a challenging problem for adhesion. To address the problem, an adhesion adaptive control method based on pressure closed-up control is proposed. The method is described in detail and the overall system model is analyzed, including gap interference model. The PID parameters are well tuned to make a better system performance. The simulations with different gap interference are done and results are discussed respectively. The feasibility of robot which adopts adhesion adaptive control method is demonstrated by the simulation results. Finally, the effectiveness of the system is verified by the experiments conducted on various roughness walls.