Comparing capabilities of gecko and suction based wall climbing robots for adhesion, and transition

Abstract

Wall climbing robots (WCR)’s uses different techniques to adhere the vertical environments. These techniques include the method of using suction cups that can adhere the walls when the air present there is removed. The other technique uses the gecko materials that can adhere the walls as geckos can do. Comparison between the two techniques was studied and presented in this paper, in order to give an overview of their usage according to the requirement based on adhesion mechanism and plane transitions in 3-D environments, and the results were obtained from the experiments. Those results were than compared from the gecko-like adhesion based WCRs from that were taken from the literature. It has found that although developed WCR was efficient in adhesion that can lift up to 600g where all the geckos that were compared are as most efficient as to take 110g of weight. For transitioning the surfaces all of them are capable to climb the surfaces up to 90 degrees. Where these geckos were capable of avoiding the obstacles where the pneumatic WCR was not capable of avoiding the obstacles, this was due to the lack of steering mechanism. For the future work it is recommended to introduce steering mechanism in the following WCR, so that it can change its directions