抄録
The wall climbing of buildings is one of the dangerous tasks. This area of research focus on climbing artificial structures, such as vertical walls with flat and uneven surfaces. In order to climb the wall, the climbing robots are developed based on two ideas; vacuum pads and claws. However, the vacuum pads are suffered from the air leak on the uneven surface, and the claw may scratch the surface. In order to achieve the wall climbing on the uneven surface without scratching, we developed the novel vacuum pad, named Universal Vacuum Gripper (UVG), based on Universal Gripper (UG). UG is the robot hand that using jamming of coffee powder inside a balloon to grip the material with uneven surface. UVG is a vacuum pad with the deformable skirt based on UG. If the skirt shape is deformed along with surfaces, the air leak can be avoided. Moreover, the deformed skirt can be stiffened, thereby works as claws. In this paper, we developed the wall climbing robot with UVG, and evaluated it on uneven surfaces.
