A wall-climbing robot without any active suction mechanisms

This paper presents a wall-climbing robot that uses passive suction cups as the adhering components. Using a single motor, this robot can not only move on a wall but can also autonomously attach and detach suction cups to the wall. Passive suction cups do not consume additional energy to maintain adhesion. Therefore, the proposed robot can perform the wall-climbing motion with relatively low energy consumption. In order to prevent the robot from falling, a supporting tail was designed. Moreover, load distribution analysis showed that the tail can be used to enhance the distribution of the loads across the suction cups. In this paper, the optimal parameters of the robot are described and a robot is fabricated based on this analysis. We conducted experiments to verify the robot performance.