Effective Pneumatic Scheme and Control Strategy of a Climbing Robot for Class Wall Cleaning on High-rise Buildings

A new kind of pneumatic climbing robot is presented to meet the requirements of glass-wall cleaning for high-rise buildings, which is totally actuated by pneumatic cylinders and attached to the glass wall with vacuum suckers. Using the pneumatic actuators the climbing robot can be made lightweight and dexterous. At the same time the movement driven by pneumatic actuators has the characteristic of passive compliance. In order to solve the problems of high speed movement for the Y cylinder and precise position control of the X cylinder, the applied pneumatic schemes of X and Y cylinders are employed to drive the high-speed on-off solenoid valves and an ordinary valve to adjust the air-flow and pressure to the cylinders. Furthermore a method of segment and variable bang-bang controller is proposed to implement the accurate control of the position servo system for the X cylinder during the sideways movement. Testing results show that the novel approach can effectively improve the control quality. This cleaning robot can meet the requirements of realization.

[1]  Jianwei Zhang,et al.  A novel approach to pneumatic position servo control of a glass wall cleaning robot , 2004, 2004 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37566).

[2]  Gary M. Bone,et al.  Accurate position control of a pneumatic actuator using on/off solenoid valves , 1997, Proceedings of International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[3]  Suwat Kuntanapreeda,et al.  Fuzzy neural bang-bang controller for satellite attitude control , 2001, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[4]  Jianwei Zhang,et al.  Realization of a Service Robot for Cleaning Spherical Surfaces , 2005 .

[5]  Brian Surgenor,et al.  Pulse-Width Modulation Control of a Pneumatic Positioning System , 2003 .

[6]  Jianwei Zhang,et al.  Realization of a Service Climbing Robot for Glass-wall Cleaning , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics.

[7]  Paul Bustamante,et al.  Robicen: A wall-climbing pneumatic robot for inspection in nuclear power plants , 1994 .

[8]  Gi Sang Choi,et al.  A study on tracking position control of pneumatic actuators , 2002 .

[9]  Jin Bae Park,et al.  Navigation of cleaning robots using triangular-cell map for complete coverage , 2003, 2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.03CH37422).

[10]  Gi Sang Choi,et al.  A study on tracking position control of pneumatic actuators using neural network , 1998, IECON '98. Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (Cat. No.98CH36200).

[11]  Hendrik Van Brussel,et al.  Concepts for dynamic obstacle avoidance and their extended application in underground navigation , 2003, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[12]  Masaro Nishigami,et al.  Glass Roof Cleaning Robot System “Canadian Crab” , 1992 .