Wall-climbing robots can be widely applied in search and rescue, nuclear power plant maintenance, pressure pipeline inspection and so on, as a kind of special robots in extreme environment. However, the traditional single motion mode can not ensure the stable adhesion of the robot on complex wall surfaces. Inspired by the structure characteristics of flies and clingfish, a biomimetic flexible spine wheel and an eddy suction cup mechanism are proposed. Then, based on the law of mechanism configuration synthesis, a novel wall-climbing locomotion mechanism is developed by equipping these above biomimetic mechanisms. With the elastic mechanics theory of finite element, the original stiffness matrix of a single spine wheel at different stiffness is deduced. Based on the transformation mechanism of rotation matrix and the original stiffness matrix of the spine wheel, an innovative contact model is set up to analyze the forces acting on a single spine wheel. Beyond that, mechanical analysis model between suction force and load is also presented, and the simulation results show that the mechanical model is effective and reasonable in the selection of vacuum component. Finally, we fabricated the wall-climbing robot adopting the technology of 3D printing and precision machining to verify its climbing performance. Meanwhile, experiment results present the robot could climb stably on the 0-360° wall surfaces.
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