From: guanghua@cs.hw.ac.uk (Guanghua Zhang)
Newsgroups: comp.robotics
Subject: Climbing robots
Date: 30 Jul 92 12:16:55 GMT
Organization: Dept of Computer Science, Heriot-Watt University, Scotland

To the question I sent a couple weeks ago about climbing robots, here
are the replies I recieved.

Thanks to those who provided the information.

_____________________________________________________-
Question:

Does anybody know if there are any robots that can 
walk/climb on walls, i.e. something like the spiderman ?

________________________________
From: Franklin Chang <fc0v+@andrew.cmu.edu>

     Toys R Us has a car that can drive up walls.  On the wheels are
little plungers.  That might give you some ideas.
Frank
________________________________

I've seen several, particularly if you count the sides of ships as walls.
The Japanese have made (and sold?) a robot which cleans ships for example.
However, I don't know of any refs of the top of my head - sorry.
>
>How difficult to design such a robot ?

Erm, probably not very, provided:
	You're not planning on moving quickly
	
	You don't have to carry your power supply around with you.  If you
	must, I suspect some form of petrol engine would be the way to go.
	
	The surfaces aren't going to be too rough.  All the ones to date
	use either magnetic "feet" or suction cups - and ensure that at all
	times they have enough feet attached to keep them on the wall, while
	they move the unattached ones.
	
I hasten to add that I have NO experience with climbing robots, hence I may
be talking a load of bolony.

__________________________________-
From ulrich@aifh.ed.ac.uk Thu Jul 23 12:50:25 1992

A. Collie in Portsmouth has a wall climbing robot which seems to be
quite successful, it is even sold commercially.

A paper is in the proceedings of 1991 Robotics and Automation, pages
2342 to 2347.

________________________________________-

At the 1991 IEEE Robotics and Automation conference, I saw a talk given
by J. Billingsley from Portsmouth Polytechnic (England).  The title was:
"Robug II: An intelligent wall climbing robot".

The robot used some type of suction cup and force-sensing feet to move
up walls.  It had been tried out on real buildings, and apparently did
pretty well.  It was pretty interesting, but more emphasis was placed on
the engineering aspects than the high level control considerations in
which I was more interested, so I don't remember all that much about it.
I could get the proceedings and send you a proper reference if you are
interested. 

                         Jak Kirman                        jak@cs.brown.edu
____________________________________________-

In an article the Smithsonian did on Dr. Rodney Brooks and others at
the MIT mobot lab, there was a picture of an undergraduate that had a
climbing robot.  

It looked like it was designed to climb smooth surfaces like glass
only.

If you would like, I'll find the article ( it's at home ) and send you
his name ( it was in the caption ).

Mark D. Smucker  ---  mds@iastate.edu
-- 
=====================================================================
 G Zhang, Dept. of Computer Science JANET:  guanghua@uk.ac.hw.cs
 Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton   UUCP:  guanghua@hwcs.uucp
 Edinburgh, Scotland, UK              Tel:  (031) 449 5111 x4177 
Newsgroups: comp.robotics