A Wheeled Wall-Climbing Robot with Bio-Inspired Spine Mechanisms

This paper presents a wheeled wall-climbing robot with the ability to climb concrete, brick walls using circular arrays of miniature spines located around the wheel. The robot consists of two driving wheels and a flexible tail, just like letter “T”, so it is called Tbot. The simple and effective structure of Tbot enables it to be steerable and to transition from horizontal to vertical surfaces rapidly and stably. Inspired by the structure and mechanics of the tarsal chain in the Serica orientalis Motschulsky, a compliant spine mechanism was developed. With the bio-inspired compliant spine mechanism, the climbing performance of Tbot was improved. It could climb on 100° (10° past vertical) brick walls at a speed of 10 cm·s−1. A mechanical model is also presented to analyze the forces acting on spine during a climbing cycle as well as load share between multi-spines. The simulation and experiment results show that the mechanical model is suitable and useful in the optimum design of Tbot.