Proposal of built-in-guide-rail type building façade cleaning robot and its motion planning algorithm

Owing to the increasing number of high-rise buildings and large glass facades and the resulting problem of safe and effective maintenance, many trials have taken place in the last few years to develop automated cleaning systems. So as to guide the robot´s movement on the facade, this study proposes the built-in-guide type building maintenance robot system using additional module such as guidance mullion to the facade. In specific, this paper proposes robotic building facade cleaning system which is directly subjected to minimize human labor; that improves the process efficiency and economic feasibility. The sensor for detecting contamination of building´s outer-wall glass is proposed; Kalman filter was used for estimating robots´ status with the contamination of the window glass. Through the simulations, an effective way of task execution is introduced and the feasibility was verified with the proposed sensor based motion control algorithm.