Quadruped Wall-Climbing Robot Based on Universal Vacuum Gripper

Abstract

This paper proposed a novel wall-climbing quadruped robot based on the Universal Vacuum Gripper (UVG) to inspect social infrastructure such as bridges and tunnels. UVG adheres to uneven surfaces with its deformable lip. The robot developed in the previous research has a simple structure consisting of two legs equipped with UVG and two degrees of freedom of rotation, and was able to climb uneven walls and move along the ceiling. However, the robot could not perform unattended inspections due to the difficulty in fine adjustment of the adhesion position and limited adaptations. To solve this problem, we attached UVGs to the legs of a quadruped robot that can move autonomously on the ground to perform automatic inspections of social infrastructure.