Robotic Adhesive Engineering Report

Transmittal letter

December 10, 2012

Cpt. Anthony Ferrari USN
Commanding Officer Naval Research Laboratory
U.S. Naval Research Lab
4555 Overlook Ave.
SW Washington, DC 20375

Enclosed is a copy of our investigation and recommendations for a method of autonomous naval hull climbing robots as requested by Dr. John Montgomery, Director of Research.

Dr. Montgomery requested an assessment of options for robot climbing methods as a replacement for current submarine hull inspection robots, and with long-term goals of augmenting inspection Navy dive teams. Cutting-edge hull scaling methods allow minimal operator involvement and inspection while steaming at full speed.

Due to the immature nature of the field of specialized climbing mechanisms, few solutions showed viability or had been tested for wet surface or submerged conditions. As this was a main criterion, vibrating suction cups show the most promise for immediate applications.

Vibrating suctions cups are currently capable of supporting 11.3kg each, negotiating many surfaces, and attaining speeds of 0.13 meters per second. Vibrating suction cups could be improved for future applications with faster leg motion and tuning of oscillations with ship hulls underwater. Several of the other investigated technologies also show promise for long-term solutions, provided research and testing is done under submerged conditions.

Respectfully,

Components Research Division

Encl.: Engineering Report
Office of Naval Research
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U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
Whithaus, Carl. Director
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REPORT OF INVESTIGATION

ENGINEERING REPORT ON
Adhesion Technology for Wall-climbing Robots

UC Davis Department of Mechanical Engineering

BY

December 10, 2012

Table of Contents
Executive summary1
Introduction2
Technical Background3

Compliant Microspine Arrays3
SpinybotII3
RiSE5
Compliance Hierarchy6

Bio-Inspired Dry

References: [1] A. Asbeck et al., “Scaling Hard Vertical Surfaces with Compliant Microspine Arrays,” Int. J. of Robotics Research, vol. 25, no. 12, pp. 1165-1179, Dec., 2006. [2] M. Buehler et al., “The RiSE Climbing Robot: Body and Leg Design,” Proc SPIE Int Soc Opt Eng, vol. 6230 I, May, 2006. [3] M. Spenko et al., “Foot design and integration for bioinspired climbing robots,” In review for Unmanned Systems Technology VIII. SPIE, 2006. [4] H. Zhang et al., “Service Robotic Systems for Glass Curtain Walls Cleaning on the High-rise Buildings,” VDI Ber., no. 1956, pp. 201, 2006. [5] A. Stark et al. “The effect of surface water and wetting on gecko adhesion,” The Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 215, pp. 3080-3086, September, 2012. [6] K. Tae-il et al. “Stooped Nanohairs: Geometry-controllable, unidirectional, reversible, and robust gecko-like dry adhesive,” Advanced Materials, vol. 21, no. 22, pp. 2276-2281, Mar. 2009. [10] H. Prahlad et al., "Electroadhesive robots—wall climbing robots enabled by a novel, robust, and electrically controllable adhesion technology," in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Pasadena, CA, 2008, pp. 3028-3033. [11] J. Germann et al., “Active connection mechanism for soft modular robots,” Advanced Robotics, vol. 26, no. 7, pp. 785-798, July, 2011. [12] A. Yamamoto, et al., "Wall climbing mechanisms using electrostatic attraction generated by flexible electrodes," International Symposium on Micro-NanoMechatronics and Human Science, Tokyo, 2007, pp. 389-394. [13] Y. K. Song et al., “Development of wall climbing robotic system for inspection purpose” Intelligent Robots and Systems, pp. 1990 - 199, Sep. 2008. [15] R. Zhang et al., "Design of wall climbing robots with transition capability," Robotics and Biomimetics, 2007. ROBIO 2007. IEEE International Conference on , vol., no., pp.1871-1875, 15-18 Dec. 2007. [16] W. Fischer et al., “Compact Climbing Robot Rolling on Flexible Magnetic Rollers, for Generator Inspection with the Rotor Still Installed,” Industrial Robot, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 236-241, 2012. [19] X. Zhao et al., "Analysis and Experiments on Pulse Vibrating Suction Method for Wall Climbing Robot," Advanced Materials Research, vol. 201-203, pp. 1837-1844, Feb. 2011. [21] W. Wang et al., "Suction force of vibrating suction method based on pi theorem: Analysis and experiment," Vacuum, vol. 86, no. 12, pp. 1783–1788, July 2010. [22] Q. Hong et al., “Principle and Application of Underwater Vibration Suction Method,” Proc. 2009 IEEE Int. Conf. Robotics Biomimetics, pp. 1609-1614, Dec. 2009. Nov. 2004.