Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 26-2 - 48

Control Strategy of Stable
Climbing Mechanics for
Gecko-Inspired Robot on
Vertical Arc Surface
Jinjun Duan, Bingcheng Wang, Baolin Ji, Weidong Sun,
Zhouyi Wang, and Zhendong Dai
W
ith the rapid development of global industry,
the storage capacity of oil tanks and wind turbine
towers worldwide is gradually increasing
and with it the problem of their maintenance: how to achieve
a stable attachment of maintenance equipment to such vertical
arcs? Wall-climbing robots are the ideal delivery platform
due to their interface bonding capabilities. However, the robot
is susceptible to the curvature of the curved surface. If
the contact between its attachments and the crawling surface
is inadequate, the closed chain system formed by the stance
phase is unable to resist the force impact from the sticky release,
and the risk of the robot destabilizing and tipping over
is great. To improve the robot's adaptive capacity and anti-disturbance
capability, this paper proposes an adaptive external
force-softening motion strategy for the limbs of the inner and
outer curved stance phases to ensure the stability of the robot
body. The foot end motion is orthogonally decoupled into the
forward direction and the arc surface fitting direction, and the
stance phase adopts a virtual mass-damping control model to
realize the spring cushioning behavior of the system during
the forward motion. The experimental results show that the
algorithm proposed in this paper can effectively improve the
stability of the robot in the process of vertical arc crawling and
avoid the phenomenon of unstable fall.
Use of Gecko-mimicking Robot in
Maintenance Applications
Nowadays, robots are widely used to the field of the equipment
maintenance [1]. In the face of large planes, ships and
buildings with glass exterior walls, maintenance robots need a
certain wall-crawling ability and arc surface adaptability. The
main adsorption methods of wall-climbing robots include vacuum
suction cups [2], magnetic adsorption [3],[4], hooks [5]
and dry adhesion. Low noise, low power consumption and
arc surface with strong adaptability can be characterized by
the gecko-mimicking robots which use dry adhesion as the adsorption
method. It is a good choice for the development of
maintenance robots due to its adsorption method, but there is a
problem of falling due to adhesion failure, and the coordinated
48
control of motion/force during the climbing process is particularly
important.
The gecko-mimicking robot with a four-degree-of-freedom
single-limb structure based on the analysis of the limb
motion of a gecko was analyzed and optimized [6], and a central
pattern generator (CPG) neural network control system
for gecko robot control for the motion control of the robot was
proposed and achieved a stable gait transition of the robot
through single parameter adjustment. In addition, an adaptive
motion algorithm was used to mechanically control the
robot's oscillating phase limb during detachment, constraining
the detachment force to the tangential direction, which is
independent of the state of adhesion [7]. Through the research
of Schneider on stick insects [8], a limb control strategy based
on the positive feedback of joint local velocity was proposed to
solve the compliance problem of the stance phase limb, but the
method did not match with active force control of the stance
phase limb. The static equilibrium method for solving the
minimum torque distribution under various adsorption conditions
was proposed by Vidoni et al., which enabled the robot
to achieve stable crawling on the inverted surface [9]. A sliding
control based on a virtual suspension model was proposed by
Huang, which controls the posture of the robot from the perspective
of force control to suppress the influence of external
disturbances on the posture of the torso [10]. A self-learning
algorithm based on neural network for the problem of force/
position hybrid control model establishment was designed by
Nonami et al. to realize the stable walking of the robot [11]. A
new structure of a creeping quadruped robot was designed
by Li et al. [12]. Each limb has three joints, and the body has
six joints, so that the body can be in hexagonal configuration,
rectangular configuration and twisted waist configuration.
When considering the force control of the robot foot, the
twisted waist configuration can adapt to the transitional motion
of the narrow curve. A gecko-mimicking robot for the
microgravity space station environment was developed by
Zhongyuan et al. [13] which realized the stable adhesion motion
of the robot under the condition of weightlessness, while
at the same time, the importance of mechanical regulation of
IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine
1094-6969/23/$25.00©2023IEEE
April 2023

Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 26-2

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