Design and Analysis of a Wall-Climbing Robot with Continuum Structure

Wall-climbing robots are widely used in tasks such as inspection. However, due to size constraints, conventional wall-climbing robots cannot have the ability to traverse narrow spaces while having the ability to span large distances. In this article, we presents a wall-climbing robot with continuum structure for detecting stress corrosion cracking in sealed canister within the spent fuel dry storage system. The robot employs a combination of three flexible tubes and DC motors to traverse both continuous and discontinuous walls, having the ability to traverse narrow spaces and span large distances within the spent fuel dry storage system. The forward and inverse kinematics of the robot are modelled assuming a constant curvature of the bending deformation. The simulation was carried out in Matlab and Adams, and the results showed that the top position and bending angle of the virtual backbone obtained from theory and simulation basically coincided with each other.