Design of compact climbing robots for power plant inspection

Power plants and similar facilities have to be inspected regularly for maintenance and security reasons. Automating this task by using compact climbing robots can not only decrease the total inspection time, but even allows for reaching areas that were inaccessible with conventional methods. The main contribution of this work is the description, analysis and discussion of more than 30 innovative obstacle-passing-mechanisms and vehicle structures that significantly increase the mobility of compact climbing robots. More than ten of them were developed in the context of this work and thus are described in more detail. In addition to these descriptions, these mechanisms are structured, classified and compared among each other and towards previous technologies. Finally, this work shows how these solutions can successfully be applied in real power plant applications.

*31.01.1979 in Herrsching (D);2005: Dipl.-Ing. Mechanical Engineering, TU München (D);2010: Dr.-Ing., ETH Zürich, Autonomous Systems Lab (www.asl.ethz.ch);Since 2010: Mechanical Engineer at ALSTOM-Inspection-Robotics (www.inspection-robotics.com), Development of compact mobile robots and hand-encoded scanners