Dynamics and control of a suction-type wall-climbing robot

This paper presents the trajectory tracking approach for a wall-climbing robot by using adaptive control schemes. The most important consideration for controlling the wall-climbing robot is to make sure that the wheels can be always well contacted to the wall regardless of the slope conditions without sacrificing robot's mobility. To consider different slope conditions of the wall, this paper proposes adaptive control schemes to alter the vacuum force so that different gravity effects can be properly dealt with. Practically, pressure and IMU sensors are used to provide the vacuum force and spatial posture information for realizing adaptive control schemes. Finally, MATLAB simulations and real tests for dealing with different surface slope conditions were performed with the triangle trajectories.