Tank Waalbot A tank based wall climbing robot. Goal: Develop a wall climbing robot to investigate challenges associated with climbing. Approach: Use a tank design to climb a steep surface with Van der Waals forces using a tacky polymer as treads. Benefits: Simple design shown to work in many places. Successful climbing with only one actuator (for straight line motion), or two actuators for steerable motion. Current Status: Multiple tank climbing robot prototypes were built and tested. The culmination of this effort was a small scale (under 10g) autonomous robot based on the Alice robot which is able to climb smooth 90° sufaces. It is actuated by watch motors and uses IR sensing for obstacle detection. A PIC is used for onboard control. This is the smallest autonomous climbing robot. Videos: Video 1: Alice based tank climber (2x speed).avi (XVID), quicktime 7 format. Video 2: Prototype Tank Waalbot climbing. Members: Mattias Greuter (EPFL), Carlo Menon, Metin Sitti Other Waalbots: motor Waalbot, compliant Waalbot, Tri-Leg Waalbot Papers: C. Menon, M. Murphy, M. Sitti, "Gecko Inspired Surface Climbing Robots" IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO), Shenyang, China, Aug 2004. pdf

[Alice based tank climber] [Tank prototype waalbot]