A New Pressure-adsorption Climbing Robot Realized through Ducted Fan

As an important part of the mobile robot, the rod-climbing robot is mainly responsible for reliably carrying cleaning and maintenance equipment. It overcomes the effect of gravity and is attached to high-rise rods such as pipes, utility poles, lighting poles, cable stays of bridge and lightning rods of substation. The tasks such as cleaning, detection, maintenance, etc. can be conducted more safely, efficiently and economically compared with manual work. Though, there exist some types of rod-climbing robots with different mechanical structures, their structures are too heavy or control is too complicated. This paper presents a new pressure-adsorption climbing robot, which is realized through ducted fan. Compared with the existed rod-climbing robots, the presented one have the advantages of simplified structure, easy control, small volume, light weight and strong adaptability. The feasibility of the new designed robot is experimentally verified.