Climbing cleaning robot for vertical surfaces

Regular cleaning robots rely on suction cups to keep them on the window. This results in slow robots that can not become too large. One solution is to suspend the robot from a cable, which results in different problems. The whole system becomes one big pendulum, with oscillations large enough to prevent the robot from doing its job and even damage the windows. The paper proposes a solution, by turning the entire robot in one large suction cup. The robot should have sides with rubber seals that prevent air from entering between the robot and the window, with a large fan on the back acting as a vacuum pump. By creating a pressure difference between the inside of the robot where it touches the window and the outside world, the pressure will press the robot onto the window and eliminate any oscillation. To prevent the window from bending due to the pressure difference, several wheels are placed inside the robot that touch the window. The robot also makes use of a special sensor that determines how dirty a window is. Tests show that the robot should be able to clean 25 m2 of glass per minute, while a traditional human window cleaner is only capable of cleaning 0.5 m2/min.