3DCLIMBER: A climbing robot for inspection of 3D human made structures

Abstract

3DCLIMBER is a running project in the University of Coimbra for developing a climbing robot with the capability of manipulating over 3D human-made structures. This paper mainly discuss the conceptual and detailed design and development of a Pole Climbing robot with minimum degrees of freedom which can climb over 3D structures with bends and branches followed by Preliminary test results of the robot performance. Electronics architecture and control algorithms are briefly described. The paper finishes with discussion of the current results and identifies some future works. ©2008 IEEE.