Design and Analysis of a Novel Adsorption Chamber for Climbing Machining Robot on Large and Complex Components

Large and complex components usually have surfaces with variable curvature. Most of the existing climbing robots are difficult to cover the whole surface of the component for post-processing operations such as grinding. In this paper, a wheeled negative pressure climbing robot is presented, which is equipped with novel flexible double-layer adsorption chambers that can passively comply with complex uneven curved surfaces. The proposed robot can carry various actuators to operate on the surface of the component. The dynamic analysis of the robot is carried out, and the stable adsorption condition for the robot moving on a curved surface with variable curvature is established. A series of experiments are carried out on the curved surface of the blade of a large wind turbine. The results indicate that the robot equipped with the proposed adsorption chamber can adapt to the variablecurvature surfaces of wind turbine blades (with a minimum curvature radius of 1.1 m) and carry specially designed endeffectors weighing 7.5 kg to perform surface grinding operations.