Abstract
This report describes a scanning type suction cup (SSC) specially developed as a suction cup for a wall climbing robot.
Although a wall climbing robot with vacuum type suction cup can move in spite of variation of wall materials and small unevennes of wall surface, it cannot walk essentially on the wall that contains cracks and gaps.
To cope with this problem, we proposed SSC that consists of several suction cup units. The SSC is operated by switching the ports between the vacuum pump and the suction cup units. The system makes use of the fact that the vacuuming time constant is much smaller than the time constant of pressure raising due to leak. This SSC has the following advantages
(1) Even though some of the suction cup units in SSC lie on cracks or gaps, the suction force can be generated by the remaining suction cup units.
(2) As the ports between the vacuum pump and the suction cup units on crack or gap are closed most of the time of a period, the energy loss for such suction cup units is very small.
(3) As a small size vacuum pump with light weight can be used, SSC is effectively used for an energy self-containing robot.
The basic characteristics is made clear through simulation and some-basic experiments using a specially designed SSC.
