Development of a Steel Bridge Climbing Robot Motivated by a high demand for automated inspection of civil infrastructure, this work presents an efficient design and development of a tanklike robot for structural health monitoring. Unlike most existing magnetic wheeled mobile robot designs, which may be suitable for climbing on flat steel surface, our proposed tanklike robot design uses reciprocating mechanism and rollerchains to make it capable of climbing on different structural shapes (e.g., cylinder, cube) with coated or noncoated steel surfaces. The developed robot is able to pass through the joints and transition from one surface to the other (e.g., from flat to curving surfaces). Taking into account several strict considerations (including tight dimension, efficient adhesion and climbing flexibility) to adapt with various shapes of steel structures, a prototype tanklike robot integrating multiple sensors (halleffects, sonars, inertial measurement unit, Eddy current and cameras), has been developed. Rigorous analysis of robot kinematics, adhesion force, sliding failure and turnover failure has been conducted to demonstrate the stability of the proposed design. Mechanical and magnetic force analysis together with slidingturnover failure investigation can serve as an useful framework for designing various steel climbing robots in the future. The robot is integrated with cameras and Eddy current sensor for visual and indepth fatigue crack inspection of steel structures. Experimental results and field deployments confirm the adhesion, climbing, inspection capability of the developed robot.

On Modelbased Adhesion Control of a Vortex Climbing Robot In this article, the adhesion modeling and control case of a Vortex Climbing Robot (VCR) is investigated against a surface of variable orientations. The critical adhesion force exerted from the implemented Vortex Actuator (VA) and the VCRxe2x80x99s achievable payload are analyzed under 3DOF rotations of the test surface, while extracted from both geometrical analysis and dynamicallysimulated numerical results. A modelbased control scheme is later proposed, with the goal of achieving adhesion while the VCR remains immobilized, limiting the power consumption and compensating for disturbances (e.g. moving cables) leading to CenterofMass (CoM) changes. Finally, the modelbased control scheme is experimentally evaluated, with the VCR prototype on a rotating and moving flat surface. The presented results support the use of the proposed methodology in climbing robots targeting inspection and maintenance of stationary surfaces (flat, curved etc.), as well as future robotic solutions operating on moving structures (e.g. ships, cranes, folding bridges).