Abstract
Wall-climbing welding robots (WCWRs) can replace workers in manufacturing and maintaining large unstructured equipment, such as ships. The adhesion mechanism is the key component of WCWRs. As it is directly related to the robot's ability in relation to adsorbing, moving flexibly and obstacle-passing. In this paper, a novel non-contact adjustably magnetic adhesion mechanism is proposed. The magnet suckers are mounted under the robot's axils and the sucker and wall are in non-contact. In order to pass obstacles, the sucker and the wheel unit can be pulled up and pushed down by a lifting mechanism. The magnetic adhesion force can be adjusted by changing the height of the gap between the sucker and the wall by the lifting mechanism. In order to increase the adhesion force, the value of the sucker's magnetic energy density (MED) is maximized by optimizing the magnet sucker's structure parameters with a finite element method. Experiments prove that the magnetic adhesion mechanism has enough adhesion force and that the WCWR can complete wall-climbing work within a large unstructured environment.
Highlights
With the development of economies and industrial technology, the demand for large unstructured equipment such as ships and oil tankers is increasing
This paper presents a novel design of a wheeled wall‐climbing robot
A novel mechanism which can pull up and push down the wheel units and the magnet sucker is proposed in this paper, whereby the magnetic adhesion force is adjusted by changing the gap width between the magnet and the wall
Summary
With the development of economies and industrial technology, the demand for large unstructured equipment such as ships and oil tankers is increasing. A1n0d, 6O3p:2ti0m1a3l 1 Research of a Non-Contact Adjustable Magnetic Adhesion Mechanism for a Wall-limbing Welding Robot of work, WCWRs often need to carry heavy devices and pass obstacles, and so the ability to adhere while moving is crucial. The adsorptive force is great and it can move flexibly; it is hard to change directions To overcome these disadvantages of wheel‐type and track‐type mechanisms, a non‐contact magnetic adhesion mechanism is designed. A track‐type robot was designed by Xue et al (2011) to conduct a surface treatment with its magnetic adsorption force being modulated through the former approach. An adjustable magnetic adhesion wall‐climbing robot was designed by Wen et al (2011) with the magnetic adsorption force being modulated through the latter approach. Structural design of the WCWR and the non‐contact magnetic adhesion mechanism
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