Development of a lizard-inspired wall-climbing robot using pressure sensitive adhesion

This paper presents the design, fabrication, and control of a quadruped wall-climbing robot. The robot's kinematics is inspired by lizards, which use trot-gait for the locomotion. The key features of this robot are its pressure-sensitive adhesive (PSA) enabled adhesion and peeling mechanism and the locomotion controller capable of straight and turning motion. We obtained an average vertical climbing speed of 1.35 cm/s without payload and 1.25 cm/s with a payload of 20 gm. Rapid prototyping techniques namely 3D-printing and 2D-LASER cutting are used to fabricate the entire structure of the robot, allowing easy replication of the entire robot in case a swarm of such robots is needed. This paper also reports climbing stability criteria for the developed robot expressed in terms of the pitching moment. We envisage that the developed robot can be deployed in surveillance, reconnaissance, cleaning, and repairing applications.