The SlothBot: A Novel Design for a Wire-Traversing Robot

This letter presents the SlothBot, a wire-traversing robot envisioned for long-term environmental monitoring applications. The SlothBot is a solar-powered, slow-paced, energy-efficient robot—hence its name—capable of moving on a mesh of wires by switching between branching wires. Unlike ground mobile robots or aerial robots employed in environmental monitoring applications, the use of wire-traversing robots allows for longer-term deployment because of the significantly lower energy consumption. Wire traversing, coupled with the use of solar panels, facilitates the self-sustainability of the SlothBot. Locomotion and wire-switching maneuvers are performed in a fail-safe fashion, inasmuch the robot is always firmly attached to the wires, even when switching between branching wires. This is achieved by employing a two-body structure featuring an actuated decoupling mechanism. In this letter, we show the design and the motion control of the SlothBot, together with the results of long-term monitoring experiments.