Abstract:

A vibration?driven wall?climbing robotic prototype has been studied and tested to move on horizontal to vertical wall sunfaces， which can be developed for high‐risk tasks such as the visual inspection of iron wall surface. An elastic substrate with asymmetric stiffness is designed， and the dynamics model of the vibration‐driven wall‐climbing robot is developed based on the Coulomb dry friction model， with a rotor vibration motor?spring as the actuator. The wall?climbing motion characteristics of the robot are investigated by numerical simulation， and the effects of actuator excitation frequency， wall inclination angle， and permanent magnet attraction on the average speed of the robot are analyzed. The wall motion experiment of the vibration‐driven wall‐climbing robot prototype is carried out. The results show that the average speed of the robot can be effectively improved by reasonable configuration of the permanent magnetic attraction and the excitation frequency， the average wall‐climbing speeds of 10.6 mm/s and 16.7 mm/s are achieved on the 30° and 90° walls， respectively， whereas the forward motion and backward motion can be switched by regulating the excitation frequency.

Key words: vibration‐driven, robotic phototype, actuator, wall‐climbing, inspection