Design and development of a climbing robot for wind turbine maintenance

Abstract

The evolution of the wind turbine to generate carbon-free renewable energy is rapidly growing. Thus, performing maintenance and inspection tasks in high altitude environments or difficult to access places, and even bad weather conditions, poses a problem for the periodic inspection process of the wind turbine industry. This paper describes the design and development of a scaleddown prototype climbing robot for wind turbine maintenance to perform critical tower operations. Thus, the unique feature of this maintenance robot is the winding mechanism, which uses a tension force to grip on the tower surface without falling to the ground either in static or dynamic situations, with the locomotion to perform a straight up–down motion in a circular truncated cone and the stability to work at significant heights. The robot computer-aided design (CAD) model of the mechanical mechanism, force and structural analysis, and the testing of the prototype model, are addressed in this paper. The key hardware developments that were utilized to build a low-cost, reliable and compact climbing robot are the embedded microprocessors, brushed DC motors, stepper motors and steel rope. This paper concludes with a successful preliminary experiment of a scaled down prototype proving the functionality of the concept. The potential applications for this robot are industrial maintenance, inspection and exploration, security and surveillance, cleaning, painting, and welding at extreme height conditions.