2013 4th International Conference on Intelligent Systems, Modelling and Simulation

A Novel Design Technique to Develop a Low Cost and Highly Stable Wall Climbing
Robot
Sanju N Raju,Akhil G Ravi,Vijitha Sharma,Gauri Bala
Students,Dept. of Electronics & Communication
Mohandas College of Engineering, Kerala University
Trivandrum-695544, Kerala, India
Email: getchottu@gmail.com

Aravind Sekhar R,Amritha Mary

Asst.Professor,Dept. of Electronics & Communication
Mohandas College of Engineering, Kerala University
Trivandrum-695544,Kerala, India
Email: aravindskhr.87@gmail.com

eral, climbing robots use one of three types of attachment

mechanisms: vacuum suction [1], [2], magnetic attraction
[3], [7], or gripping with claws or grasping mechanism .
Each of these mechanisms has advantages and drawbacks.
For instance, magnetic adhesion can be very strong with
the possibility of safe power failure mitigation, but is only
applicable for ferromagnetic surfaces. Suction adhesion relies on a complete seal with the surface, making cracked or
nonsmooth surfaces problematic, and power efficiency limits
their untethered climbing duration. Recently, robots using
microclaws have demonstrated [6] climbing capabilities on
surfaces such as brick and stone, but clawed and grasping
robots cannot climb smooth surfaces such as glass or painted
structures. To avoid these drawbacks, the robot presented in
this paper is designed to ultimately utilize a different type
of adhesion mechanism.
This paper presents a low cost and efficient wall -climbing
robot that can climb on almost all smooth and rough
surfaces. This robot can take a floor to wall and wall to
floor transition.To ensure mechanical stability a centrifugal
impeller is used here.The impeller positioned above the robot
helps to generate and maintain an isolated low pressure area
that makes adhesion to the vertical wall possible. For the
continuous movement of the robot a track belt arrangement
operated by a high torque, light weight dc gear motor is used.
Comparing to other vacuuum powered wall climbing robot,
the main advantage of our robot is that it does not requires
a perfect sealing for the isolated low pressure area. When
the impeller starts working, the sealing used in our robot
reshapes to the shape of the contacting surface, maintaining
the low pressure area inside.The controlling section consists
of an ATmega 8 microcontroller, RF wireless transciever
module and some discrete components. The experiment
results verified the feasibility of the robot.
The remaining of the paper is organised as follows. In the
second section basic adhesion mechanism used is reviewed
and third section discusses the mechanical design aspects
of the proposed wall climbing robot. Section 4 presents the
controlling section comprising an ATmega8 micro controller
along with RF wireless transceiver module and some discrete

AbstractIn this paper the proposed method aims to develop

a low cost and efficient wall climbing robot that can climb on
almost all surfaces. To ensure mechanical stability a centrifugal
impeller is used and positioned above the robot that helps to
generate an isolated low pressure area that makes adhesion
to the vertical wall possible. When the impeller works, the
sealing used in our robot reshapes to the shape of the contacting
surface, maintaining the low pressure area inside which is a
main advantage that eliminates the need for a perfect sealing
as required by other vacuum powered wall climbing robots.
To control the robot we use an ATmega8 micro controller
along with RF wireless transceiver module and some discrete
components. The experiment results verified the feasibility of
the robot and it can make wall to floor and floor to wall
transitions.
Keywords-Wall Climbing Robot; Centrifugal Impeller; Vacuum
Adhesion; Rexin; ATmega8 microcontroller; RF wireless transciever

I. I NTRODUCTION
The application of wall climbing robots is very much
required in places doing work such as cleaning outer walls
of high-rise buildings, construction work, inspecting storage
tanks in nuclear power plants because they are currently
performed predominantly by human operators and are extremely dangerous. For this reason, as a specific research
field of mobile robotics, a number of climbing robots capable
of climbing vertical surfaces have been researched and
developed all over the world. Researchers have proposed
a great variety of climbing robots for various applications.
Many of the first wall-scaling robots were intended for
cleaning in hazardous environments such as nuclear reactors
[1].Climbing robots face a variety of challenges distinct
from those faced by ground-traversing robots. Such challenges include needing to fully lift their entire mass in
order to make vertical progress as in the case of pull-up
style climbers, physically holding onto a vertical surface,
maneuvering laterally or over surface features, and selforienting in the vertical plane.
In recent years, climbing robots have become lighter,
more adaptable to a wide variety of surfaces, and much
more sophisticated in their functional capabilities. In gen2166-0662/13 $26.00 2013 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ISMS.2013.114

360

components. Experimental results are presented in section 5.

Conclusions are drawn in the final section.
II. A DHESION M ECHANISM
A. Centrifugal Impeller
Adhesion to the wall is mainly achieved with the help of a
centrifugal impeller [5]. An impeller is a rotating component
of a centrifugal pump, usually made of iron, steel, bronze,
brass, aluminum or plastic, which transfers energy from the
motor that drives the pump.The suction pressure can be
easily generated by impeller with backward curved vanes
that are readily available from market at low cost. Since
impellers have no large blades to turn, they can spin at much
higher speeds than propellers. Here the adequate suction
force is generated by rotating the impeller with the help a
motor. The impeller used here is a lowcost one and is taken
from car vacuum cleaner.

Figure 1.

Free body diagram showing all forces acting on sloped wall

can analyse all the forces acting on the wall and slope of
the wall varies from 0 that means parallel with the ground
to 90 which is vertical with the ground. All forces acting
on the slope wall can be shown in the free-body diagram.
Figure 1 shows free-body diagram that consists of all forces,
vacuum force, reaction force, robot weight and friction force.
The vacuum force exerted by the impeller is the pressure
difference between atmosphere pressure and inside vacuum
pressure.The robot weight is force, which depends on the
robot Mass (M) and acceleration due to gravity (g = 9.81
m/sec2 ),which has downward direction. Friction force is due
to the irregularities of the surfaces in contact. At equilibrium
condition, algebraic sum of all forces acting on the body will
be zero as per newtons law. We thus obtain the following
two equilibrium equations from equation 1 and 2, which
shows that sum of the X-Component and the sum of the Y
Component of given forces must be zero at equilibrium.
X
Fx = 0
(1)

B. Track Belt and Rexin

For the continuous movement of the robot a track belt
arrangement is used here. Track belts are a positive transfer
belt and can track relative movement. The suction force
generated by rotating impeller along with track belt ensures
that propoer adhesion force is generated. Apart from track
belt here a rexin material is used. Rexin is primarily vinyl
but also contain a rubberised plasticizer to make it flexible
and light. They are generally considered very flexible and
is of light weight. In this proposed aproach we use this
flexible,light weight and low cost rexin along with the
impeller that can reshape to the shape of the contacting
surface, maintaining the low pressure area inside which is
a main advantage of the proposed method that eliminates
the need for a perfect sealing as required by other vacuum
powered wall climbing robots .

Reaction force - vacuumforce - robotweight = 0

X
Fy = 0

C. Foam Board

(2)

Robotweight - frictional force = 0

We can calculate the vacuum force required to hold the
robot by the following equations

Here a foam board is used as the body of robot to make

it light weight. Foam board, also known as foamcore, is a
very strong light weight and easily cut material. It consists of
three layers - an inner layer of polystyrene clad with outer
facing of either a white claycoated paper or brown kraft
paper. Besides being light weight, this material is strong
enough which makes it best suited for building the robotic
body.
The suction force generated by rotating impeller along with
track belt and rexin ensures that proper adhesion force is
generated.

Pv acuum = Patmospher e Pabsolute

(3)

where
Pv acuum :- vacuum pressure
Patmospher e :- Atmospheric pressure
Pabsolute :- Absolute pressure
Since Force=Pressure*Area we can calculate the vacuum
force as shown below

III. M ECHANICAL D ESIGN

Fv acuum = Patmospher e Ao Pabsolute Ai

The problem of how to hold the robot on the wall is solved

by many methods. There are many factors, which effect in
holding, all forces, robot movement and mechanical design.
The required suction force is analysed from the free body
diagram as shown below. From the free body diagram we

where
Fv acuum :- vacuum force required to hold the robot
Ao :- The area of the outer circle of the impeller
Ai :- The area of the inner circle of the impeller
361

(4)

Figure 3.
Figure 2.

Block diagram of Controlling Section

Wall Climbing Robot

The frictional force is given by

(Fv acuum + M gcos) = M gsin

Low-power Atmel AVR 8-bit Microcontroller with advanced

RISC architecture. It has 130 Powerful Instructions most
single-clock cycle execution, 32 8 general purpose working
registers, fully static operation, up to 16MIPS throughput
at 16MHz, On-chip 2-cycle Multiplier etc. The AVR was
one of the first microcontroller families to use on-chip
flash memory for program storage, as opposed to one-time
programmable ROM, EPROM, or EEPROM used by other
microcontrollers at the time. The AVR architecture was
coFlash, EEPROM, and SRAM are all integrated onto a
single chip, removing the need for external memory in most
applications.
The RF module, as the name suggests, operates at Radio Frequency. The corresponding frequency range varies between
30 kHz and 300 GHz. In this RF system, the kind of modulation used is Amplitude Shift Keying (ASK). Transmission
through RF is better than IR (infrared) because of many
reasons. Firstly, signals through RF can travel through larger
distances making it suitable for long range applications.
Also, while IR mostly operates in line-of-sight mode, RF
signals can travel even when there is an obstruction between
transmitter and receiver. RF communication uses a specific
frequency unlike IR signals which are affected by other
IR emitting sources. This RF module comprises of an RF
Transmitter and an RF Receiver. The transmitter/receiver
(Tx/Rx) pair operates at a frequency of 434 MHz. An RF
transmitter receives serial data and transmits it wirelessly
through RF through its antenna. The transmission occurs at
the rate of 1Kbps - 10Kbps. The transmitted data is received
by an RF receiver operating at the same frequency as that
of the transmitter. The RF module is often used along with
a pair of encoder/decoder. The encoder is used for encoding
parallel data for transmission feed while reception is decoded
by a decoder.Encoder and decoder ICs used here are HT12E
and HT12D. The block diagram of controlling section is
shown in figure 3.

(5)

where is the coefficient of friction and g the acceleration

due to gravity. From equation 5 , we can find the friction
force that should be theoretically equal to the robot weight,
in order to hold the robot on the wall. But we should
construct the robot that has robot weight less than friction
force,because we do not know some unknown forces. Since
the material used here is a foam board the robot weight
will be minimum and the problem can be solved. If robot
weight in X-axis is less than friction force, robot weight
cannot overcome maximum friction force and the robot will
not slide to ground, but still hold on the wall with a vacuum
cup. The equations are as shown below
(Fv acuum + M g(Cos)) M g(Sin)

(6)

and from equation 6 we can determine the value of as

Sin/(Fv acuum /M g) + Cos

(7)

From equation 7, we can choose parameter to improve the

climbing efficiency that the robot can climb much slope.
Here the main advantage of our proposed method is that
we need not have to calculate the exact amount of forces
as per the above equation. Only an approximate value is
sufficient since the the rexin and track belt mechanism is also
providing an additional amount of force needed to make the
robot climb the wall. So from the above equations and also
by using experimental data we have designed the proposed
robot model and is shown in figure 2.
IV. C ONTROLLING S ECTION
The heart of the control mechanism is an ATmeg8 microcontroller along with RF wireless transceiver module and
some discrete components.ATmega 8 is High-performance,
362

made light weight by using foam board as the material. A

model for adhesive performance for a climbing robot was
developed and experimental results presented well the ability
of the robot to climb both rough and smooth surfaces and
one of the major achievement is the payload capacity of the
robot which is almost 4 times its weight. The proposed low
cost method can be used as a best substitute for vacuum
powered wall climbing robots.

V. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
The justification of our proposed method is well proved
with the help of the experiments conducted. Here to show
the effectiveness of our robot to climb both hard and smooth
surfaces it is made to climb a concrete wall, wooden door,
window glass, metallic surface and also the wall ceiling.
The performance of the robot in all these cases is shown in
figure 4. The overall weight of the robot is approximately
120 grams. Inorder to show the payload capacity the robot
is tested using a load weighing 500 grams and the result is
shown in figure 5.

R EFERENCES
[1] W. Yan, L. Shuliang, X. Dianguo, Z. Yanzheng, S. Hao, and
G. Xueshan, Development and Application of Wall Climbing
robots.in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Robot. Autom.,1999, pp. 12071212.
[2] S. Hirose, A. Nagakubo, and R. Toyama,Machine that can Walk
and Climb on Floors, Walls and Ceilings,in Proc. Int. Conf.
Adv. Robot., 1991,vol. 1, pp. 753-758.
[3] J. Grieco, M. Prieto, M. Armada, and P. Gonzalez de Santos,
A Six-Legged Climbing Robot for High Payloads, in Proc. Int.
Conf. Control Appl.,1998, pp. 446-450.
[4] Michael P. Murphy,Metin Sitti,AWaalbot: An Agile SmallScale Wall-Climbing Robot Utilizing Dry Elastomer Adhesives,IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, vol. 12, no.
3,JUNE 2007,pp. 330-338.
[5] Jun Li,Xueshan Gao,Ningjun Fan,Kejie Li,Zhihong Jiang,
BIT Climber: A Centrifugal Impeller-Based Wall Climbing
Robot,IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and
Automation, August 2009, pp.4605-4609

Figure 4. Showing the robot on various surfaces.(1) Ceiling (2)Glass

(3)Metallic Surface (4)Wooden Door (5)Concrete Wall and (6)Floor to Wall
Transition

[6] William R. Provancher,Samuel I. Jensen-Segal,Mark A.

Fehlberg,ROCR: An Energy-Efficient Dynamic Wall-Climbing
Robot IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, vol. 16, no.
5,October 2011,pp. 897-906.
[7] Kosuke Nagaya, Tomohiko Yoshino, Makoto Katayama,
Iwanori Murakami, Yoshinori Ando,Wireless Piping Inspection Vehicle Using Magnetic Adsorption Force, IEEE/ASME
Transactions on Mechatronics, vol. 17, no. 3,JUNE 2012,pp
472-479.

Figure 5.

Robot with the Load weighing 500 grams

The main advantage of our proposed method is that, the

robot besides climbing almost all smooth and rough surfaces
was also able to carry load that is approximately 4 times its
weight. This is mainly achieved using the rexin material that
aids the vacuum force generated by the impeller.
VI. C ONCLUSION
The novel technique of achieving mechanical stabilty in
a wall climbing robot is presented here. Here the robot is
363