Investigation of Rotors Imitating Bird Wings to Reduce Electricity Consumption of HORNET

Osaka, 558-8585, Japan, takada@eng.osaka-cu.ac.jp. Abstract— To address the deterioration of bridges and buildings, we have developed a robot, HORNET, to inspect building walls. This robot travels on the wall surface using propellers with wheels on the wall. As the running duration is short on smooth surfaces, the crosssectional shape of the rotor was designed to reduce the power consumption using two-dimensional numerical analysis using a genetic algorithm. Furthermore, we manufactured several kinds of rotors imitating birds and performed experiments to determine the ideal shape to reduce electricity consumption. Experiments were also conducted to evaluate the performance when the rotor was attached to HORNET. First, we developed HORNET's dynamic model and evaluated the performance by running a simulation on a route imitating the actual inspection route. Additionally, by installing a new rotor in HORNET, we evaluated the running performance on the up and down paths.