Design and stability analysis of a novel wall-climbing robotic platform (ROPE RIDE)

•A new stability measure for wall-climbing robots is proposed.•A rope-ascender and propeller thrusters based wall-climbing robot is suggested.•The experiments verify the good capability of wall-climbing and obstacle-overcoming.

This paper presents a novel robotic platform (ROPE RIDE: RObotic Platform Enabling Rope access In Dangerous Environment) to efficiently climb up various types of walls with the help of a rope ascender. A stability measure for a wall-climbing robotic platform is suggested in order to tactfully deal with detrimental effects of such disturbances on its mobile stability as obstacles on various types of walls or the interaction between its payload and environments. Based on the stability analysis, the wall-climbing robotic platform is systematically designed to ensure the mobile stability against external disturbances. The ROPE RIDE is subsequently constructed upon a rope ascender-based locomotion mechanism combined with the triangular tracks for smooth obstacle-climbing. In order to effectively maintain the adhesion to a wall during climbing up, two propeller thrusters are also adopted and a 1-DOF wall-cleaning unit using a ball–screw mechanism is installed as a payload to perform a cleaning task. The extensive experiments using the proposed ROPE RIDE on walls are carried out to demonstrate its superior capability of climbing up and cleaning walls of buildings.