SIEN: Telescopic-Arm Climbing-Support Robot

Paper:

SIEN: Telescopic-Arm Climbing-Support Robot

Tomoyuki Yamaguchi, Yoshiaki Sorioka, Sunhong Park, and Shuji Hashimoto
Department of Applied Physics, Waseda University E-mail: {gucci, sorioka, paku, shuji}@shalab.phys.waseda.ac.jp [Received February 1, 2009; accepted June 1, 2009]

SIEN represents a novel safety measure concept in making climbing service robots feasible, e.g., in keeping them from falling off a wall due to concavity, convexity, or insufcient adhesion. The wall climbingsupport robot SIEN we developed uses a telescopic arm to support itself. The arm has a joint with sensors to detect robot speed and direction of movement. SIEN follows and supports the climbing robot based on feedback using detected force. SIEN enabled the robot to climb walls reliably and safely, as demonstrated in experimental results.

Keywords: climbing robot, climbing-support robot, telescopic-arm, feedback control

1. Introduction
Building, utility, and plant walls require regular inspection and maintenance, usually by human operators using scaffolding and gondolas, to ensure structural integrity and safety. Conventional inspection and maintenance are hazardous and take time. Robots able to negotiate vertical surfaces could conduct these tasks instead of human operators, saving time and money. Wall climbing by robots has used vacuum suction, biomimetic adhesion, magnetism, and aerodynamicsbased attraction-force generators. WallWalker [1], for example, cleans windows using vacuum suction, but is limited to glass surfaces. Magnetic adhesion is reliable and practical, but is limited to metallic surfaces, such as those in the internal inspection of steel pipes and walls [2, 3]. Vortex Climber [4] and City-Climber [5] use aerodynamic attraction created by suction motors, and they have achieved mobility on brick and concrete walls. Gecko tape [6] made by microfabricating dense arrays of exible plastic pillars, are also promising. Waalbot [7] uses dry adhesive features to climb walls. SpinyBotII [8] is a biomimetic robot inspired by climbing insects and spiders. This wide variety of approaches has only one problem lack of practical application due to insufcient safety and reliability. Among safety measures developed for climbing robots, Tso et al. [9] developed a tile-wall inspection robot. Elkmann et al. [10] and Zhang et al. [11] developed service robots to clean glass walls. These robots are useful on

building facades supported by roof cables, but are difcult to use inside buildings such as nuclear facilities. Kitai et al. [12] and Suzuki et al. [13] proposed a swarm approach involving multiple wall-climbing robots, but application is limited by the use of magnetism. Focusing on robot support from beneath and on different types of walls, we introduce novel support for safe robot climbing [14]. SIEN supports the robot via a telescopic arm that prevents the robot from falling. The telescopic arm operates up and down while the mobile base follows the robot left to right. It is applicable indoors such as in nuclear plant inspection robot because it requires only enough space for SIEN to movement. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the SIEN concept and architecture. Section 3 discusses control and safety. Section 4 details experimental results conrming SIEN feasibility. Section 5 explores the effect of SIEN by measuring robot support force. Section 6 presents conclusions.

2. Climbing-Support Robot
2.1. Concept Figure 1 shows the basic climbing-support robot concept, focusing on keeping the robot from falling off the wall it is climbing through support from beneath. The climbing robots movement information is unknown for control of climbing support robot. When the climbing robot moves up, the direction of the climbing robot varies depending on the orientation. For example, when the orientation of the climbing robot is upward, the command should be forward. When the orientation is downward, the command should be backward. The climbing-support robot must know the climbing robots orientation and the command to follow the climbing robot on the wall. We use force sensing to detect robot climbing so that the support robot need not know information on command signals and orientation. Force sensors are at the top of the support robots telescopic arm, which is controlled to keep pushing constant while keeping vertical and horizontal force at zero by moving the telescopic arm and mobile base, enabling the support robot to follow and support the climbing robot.

Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics Vol.21 No.5, 2009

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Yamaguchi, T., Sorioka, Y., Park, S., and Hashimoto, S.

Table 1. Climbing-robot specications.

Climbing robot

Joint

Size [mm] Mass [kg] Battery [V] Velocity [m/s]

300200130 0.99 6 0.1

Climbing robot

Servo motor Force sensor

Telescopic-Arm
Strain gauges

(a) Climbing-support robot SIEN

(b) Joint

Fig. 3. Omnidirectional climbing-support robot and joint with force sensors and servomotor. Table 2. Support-robot specications.

Support robot

Fig. 1. System concept.

Size [mm] Arm Length [mm] Actuator Mass [kg] Velocity [m/s]

550550300 1110-1700 DC Motor(6),Servomotor(1) 40 MAX: 0.3

2.4. SIEN Arm

The SIEN telescopic arm adjusts force applied based on climbing movement. The arm extends vertically, but not horizontally, since the mobile base provides horizontal movement. A small joint on the top of the arm, shown in Fig. 3(b), is connected to the climbing robot to provide a servomotor and maintain a constant angle between the wall and joint. A force sensor and strain gauges in the joint measure three-dimensional (3D) force vectors applied to the joint in climbing. When the robot moves, strain gauges detect force lengthwise and crosswise to the wall. The force sensor detects force toward the wall, as shown in Fig. 4. DC motor torque at the arm base is transmitted to an extension pinion gear via pulleys and drive belts to extend or contract the arm, whose length varies from 1100 mm to 1700 mm.

(a) Robot

(b)Ducted Fans

Fig. 2. Wall-climbing robot.

2.2. Climbing Robot

The climbing robot we used is a Zero Gravity wall climber (Spin Master Ltd.) [15], as shown in Fig. 2(a). Two ducted fans are in the middle as shown in Fig. 2(b). The climbing robot is controlled via wireless communication from an external controller. Table 1 lists the climbing robots specications.

3. Support
3.1. Estimating Climbing Robot Speed
Parameters for estimating climbing robot speed are dened in Table 3. Fig. 5 shows the relationship between support robot coordinates and setup parameters. Climbing robot locomotive force Fx , Fz , and assistance Fassist , are calculated using detected force fx , fy , fz , fy0 , and fz0 , acting on the joint as follows: Fx = fx Fz = fz fz0 . . . . . . . . . . . . (1) F assist = f y . Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics Vol.21 No.5, 2009

2.3. SIEN Base

Figure 3 shows the climbing-support robot, SIEN. Specications are listed in Table 2. A PC (PentiumIII, 512 MHz) controls climbing support. To realize the required support for a climbing robot, we used an omnidirectional mobile base mainly for horizontal movement of the climbing robot. The base is too heavy to tip over. 622