A Magnetic Multi-Modal Wall-Climbing Robot with Configurable Switching

With the widespread application of steel structures such as oil storage tanks, metal bridges, and ships, the demand for metal surface health inspection and maintenance continues to grow. Wall-climbing robots are crucial for performing inspection and maintenance tasks on metal structures. However, traditional fixed-configuration robots like wheeled and tracked wall climbing robots struggle to simultaneously maintain posture adjustment capabilities and stable adhesion when overcoming typical obstacles such as traversing 90°right-angle edges and spanning wide gaps due to their rigid configurations. To overcome these limitations in wall climbing robots, we propose a multi-modal magnetic adhesion wall-climbing robot with autonomous reconfiguration capabilities. This robot employs a modular joint design, including pitch joints, swing arm joints, and steering joints, integrated with magnetic wheel units featuring built-in hub motors. This enables dynamic switching between Configuration 1 and Configuration 2. Through prototype fabrication and experimentation, the robot demonstrated stable motion performance on vertical and horizontal surfaces within our simulated industrial environment. It successfully navigated internal 90-degree corners and traversed gaps at equal heights across different modes. Experimental results confirm that our multi-modal design significantly enhances the robot's adaptability and traversal capability in complex wall environments, providing an effective solution for reliable operation of wall-climbing robots in unstructured industrial settings.