A survey of climbing robots: Locomotion and adhesion

Multiple times of climbing robots exist. The biggest issues with climbing robots are adhesion and mobility. A large portion of climbing robots use legs and suction cups. In general, the more legs a robot has, the more it can carry, but it will also become much more complex and less energy efficient. Wheel driven robots are much faster due to their continuous motion, but are not able to move over irregular surfaces and have a lower carrying capacity. Tracked robots have the advantages of both, they have virtually continuous motion while still being able to drive over small obstacles. The most commonly used adhesion method is vacuum suction. The main disadvantage of this method is that once the vacuum seal is compromised, the robot will drop. A solution is to use multiple vacuum cups and to only use this method on smooth surfaces. Magnetic adhesion has the benefit of being much more reliable, but it only works on ferromagnetic surfaces.