A design of wall-climbing robot used to clean the airplane fuselage and wings

Abstract

The wall-climbing robot is wildly used to clean the machine, equipment and containers in all kinds of fields, however up to now, it does not achieve too much attention of aeronautic industry. For most airlines, large cleaning vehicles are applied to clean the surface of airplane, however the equipment is usually bulky and consumes a large amount of water resources. This manual operation has the disadvantages of high risk. For the use of wall-climbing robot, there is one big obstacle that the robot can't cross the connection area between the wing and fuselage, which will reduce the cleaning efficiency. In this paper, a design of wall-climbing robot is introduced to solve the problem, based on the principle of negative pressure adsorption. The robot can not only keep the airplane clean that is resistant to corrosion, but also decrease the fuel consumption caused by pollutants. The high efficiency and low cost will much benefit the airlines. The visual processing and detection unit can help the operator control the robot in a safe and reliable way to prevent causing damage to the airplane.