Research on self climbing maintenance robots for elevators

This paper is concerned with a self climbing mechanism for the space elevator. The mechanism is required to have driving and pinching functions at least. The driving one is used for making the climber climb up and down along the tether. The pinching one is needed for that the climber does not slip down the tether. Here, it is noticed that the weak pinching force occurs slip down the tether and strong pinching force increases friction forces between the driving wheels and the tether. Thus, it can be said that the climbing mechanism decides the most of the performance of the climber. Then, there are possibilities to propose various kinds of mechanisms. In this paper, we show our constructed climber model. This climber has the PWS type mechanism with two driving wheels like a mobile robot. In addition, its pinching force for can be changed with two passive wheels. Then, the climber can control its position and orientation with the mentioned mechanism. Finally, we show experiment results using our constructed climber model in order to confirm the validity of the proposed system. In the results, it climbed up and down along the tether in up to 300 meters high.