The paper studied the climbing structure and magnet selection method of exploration platform utilized for large-scale steel structures such as vessel surface. With respect to wall climbing robots, the study proposed a stable operation structure even in rapid incline change of vessel surface. Since the wheel-based operating method is hard to work flexibly in inclination changes, we employed joints and designed the robot to have a rotation joint in the center. The arrangement of wheels is an important aspect of this structure. Viewed from the side, the robot wheels should overlap with each other to have intersection points. The wheels here are ring-type permanent magnets and serve as a tool of attachment on walls. Based on the conditions identified through formula modeling, we proposed the required magnetic force. Important factors needed for magnetic force setup include platform weight, angle between ground and inclined plane, and friction coefficient. We considered only the required magnetic force for the stable adhesion of circular magnet while making not a separate mention about the necessary force for directional locomotion. The analysis results of ANSYS Maxwell are applied to magnetic attachment. Based on the final analysis results, we built a platform and found it did not slip and stayed attached on steel plate.

The camera embedded wall climbing robot in this paper combines the suction and aerodynamic attraction to achieve good balance between strong adhesion force and high mobility and adopts embedded image processing technique to detect targets on the warehouse inspection. Experimental results showed that the robot can move upward on the wall at the speed of 2.9m/min and carry 5kg payload in addition to 2.5kg self-weight, which record the highest payload capacity among climbing robots of similar size. With two 11.1V lithium-polymer battery, the robot can operate continuously for half hours. A wireless camera system, zigbee protocol module and several sensors was adopted for detecting target objects and dangerous situation on the wall and for sending alarm signals to remote sensor node or manager.

This paper proposes an automated crack evaluation technique for a high-rise bridge pier using a climbing robot. The proposed technique enables to automatically detect and quantify the bridge pier cracks even where cannot easily access by human for visual inspection. To achieve it, high quality images are obtained by scanning the vision cameras embedded on the climbing robot along the bridge pier surface. Then, a feature extraction-based image stitching algorithm is newly developed and applied for establishing the entire region of interest (ROI) images. The ROI images are then processed with a semantic segmentation algorithm for automated crack detection. Finally, the detected cracks are precisely quantified by a crack quantification algorithm. The proposed technique is validated using in-situ test data obtained from Jang-Duck bridge located at Gangneung city, South Korea. The test results reveal that the proposed technique successfully evaluate the bridge pier cracks with precision of 90.92 % and recall of 97.47 %.

This paper presents a column-climbing robot with a mechanical manipulator, which can spirally go up and down a column using wheels. The developed robot can do useful works using the manipulator at the top of a column, e.g., electric pole while communicating wirelessly with an operator panel. It is driven using a battery without any power cables, and the average duration of power is at least one hour. The robot has a function to detect a work object using an optical sensor installed at the bottom of the manipulator. The spirally column-climbing robot developed is demonstrated by experimental works and also by showing it at an exhibition.

In this paper, we propose a cable climbing robot which can climb up and down the cables in the bridges. The robot mechanism consists of three parts: a wheel based driving mechanism, adhesion mechanism, and safe landing mechanism. The wheel based driving mechanism is driven by tooth clutches and motors. The adhesion mechanism plays the role of maintaining adhesion force by a combination of pantograph, ball screw, and springs even when the power is lost. The safe landing mechanism is developed for guaranteeing the safety of the robot during operations on cables. It can make the robot fall down with reduced speed by dissipating the gravitational forces. The robot mechanism is designed and manufactured for validating its effectiveness.

This paper proposes an optimal ARS control of a two-wheel mobile inverted pendulum robot. Conventional researches are highly concentrated on the robust control of a mobile inverted pendulum on the flat ground, i.e., mostly focus on the compensation of gyroscope signals. This newly proposed algorithm deals with a climbing control of a slanted surface based on the dynamic modeling using the conventional structure. During the climbing control of the robot, unexpected disturbance forces are essentially caused by the irregular contact force which comes from the irregular contact angle between the wheel and the terrain. The disturbances have effects on the optimal posture of the mobile robot to compensate the slanted angle. Therefore the dynamics equations through physical interpretation are derived for the selection of optimum climbing posture through ARS. Also using the ultrasonic sensor the slope information is obtained to compensate for the force of gravity. The control inputs are dynamically adjusted to climb up the slanted surface effectively. The proposed algorithm is demonstrated through the real experiments.

This paper describes efficient flight control algorithms for building a reconfigurable ad-hoc wireless sensor networks between nodes on the ground and airborne nodes mounted on autonomous vehicles to increase the operational range of an aerial robot or the communication connectivity. Two autonomous flight control algorithms based on adaptive gradient climbing approach are developed to steer the aerial vehicles to reach optimal locations for the maximum communication throughputs in the airborne sensor networks. The first autonomous vehicle control algorithm is presented for seeking the source of a scalar signal by directly using the extremum-seeking based forward surge control approach with no position information of the aerial vehicle. The second flight control algorithm is developed with the angular rate command by integrating an adaptive gradient climbing technique which uses an on-line gradient estimator to identify the derivative of a performance cost function. They incorporate the network performance into the feedback path to mitigate interference and noise. A communication propagation model is used to predict the link quality of the communication connectivity between distributed nodes. Simulation study is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed reconfigurable airborne wireless networking control algorithms.

In this paper, a wall climbing robot, called LAVAR, is developed, which is using an impeller for adhering. The adhesion mechanism of the robot consists of an impeller and two-layered suction seals which provide sufficient adhesion force for the robot body on the non smooth vertical wall and horizontal ceiling. The robot uses two driving-wheels and one ball-caster to maneuver the wall surface. A suspension mechanism is also used to overcome the obstacles on the wall surface. For its design, the whole adhering mechanism is analyzed and the control system is built up based on this analysis. The performances of the robot are experimentally verified on the vertical and horizontal flat surfaces.