An adaptive controller of a climbing robot

摘要

Inspection work, often, involves a high number of dangerous manual operations especially in large industrial environments such as shipbuilding and construction. The last decade has seen an increasing interest in developing and employing special robots in construction in order to assist the human operator as well as to limit the damage caused to him. For this end, the ROMA robot, a specially developed self-supported robot has been built. The robot is designed to perform 3D complex movements and navigate through metallic structures using the "caterpillar" concept. In order to get a great safety in its movements, a special hardware and an adaptive control scheme architecture has been designed. The control and monitoring of the robot is achieved through an advanced Graphical User Interface, especially built, to allow an effective and user friendly operation of the robot. This paper describes the design of the ROMA robot with a special emphasis on its control and hardware architecture.