Abstract
The climbing robot Alicia3, is mainly made of three identical modules linked together by two arms actuated by two air pistons.
Each module consists of a cup, an aspirator, two wheels that are actuated by two DC motors with encoders and gearboxes, and four passive wheels to guarantee plain contact of the system on the wall.
The cups can slide over a wall by mean of a special sealing maintaining the vacuum inside the cup and at the same time creates the right amount of friction according to the system weight and the target wall kind.
This paper focuses on description of Alicia3 simulator, implemented in Simulink®, which allows testing locomotion and finding an adequate control parameters setting.
A viewer, developed in Delphi™ 7 using Mex-function to integrate it in Simulink®, is used in order to visualize Alicia3 in 3D and the sequence of operations executed to follow the reference trajectory.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
American Petroleum Institute (1992), “Tank inspection, repair, alteration and reconstruction”, Standard 653, API, Washington, DC.
Berns K. and Hillenbrand C. (2003), “Climbing robots for commercial applications — a survey”, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots CLAWAR 2003, 17–19 September, Professional Engineering Publishing, Catania, Italy, pp. 771–6.
La Rosa G., Messina M., Muscato G. and Sinatra R. (2002), “A low cost lightweight climbing robot for the inspection of vertical surfaces”, Mechatronics, Vol. 12, pp. 71–96.
Schraft R.D., Simons F., Schafer T., Keil W. and Anderson S. (2003), “Concept of a low-cost, window-cleaning robot”, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots CLAWAR 2003, 17–19 September, Professional Engineering Publishing, Catania, Italy, pp. 785–92.
Weise F., Kohnen J., Wiggenhauser H., Hillenbrand C. and Berns K. (2001), “Non-destructive sensors for inspection of concrete structures with a climbing robot”, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots CLAWAR 2001, 24–26 September, Professional Engineering Publishing, Karlsruhe, Germany, pp. 945–52.
D. Longo, G. Muscato (2004), “A modular approach for the design of the Alicia3 climbing robot for industrial inspection”, Industrial Robot: An International Journal, Vol. 31, N. 2, pp.148–158.
J. Borenstein, H.R. Everett and L. Feng, (1996) “Where am I? Sensors and methods for mobile robot positioning”, University of Michigan.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Longo, D., Muscato, G., Sessa, S. (2006). Simulator for Locomotion Control of the Alicia3 Climbing Robot. In: Tokhi, M.O., Virk, G.S., Hossain, M.A. (eds) Climbing and Walking Robots. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-26415-9_101
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-26415-9_101
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-26413-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-26415-6
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)