Development of Robotic Climber for Work-at-height Operation

In this project, a new robotic climber will be developed to fit the operation in high-rise building in Hong Kong. The façade of such high-rise buildings can serve different purposes such as ventilation windows, utilities piping, sewerage piping, and advertising billboards, among others. Maintaining these assets is an effective mean to extend the life cycle and monetary value of buildings. Conventional building façade maintenance methods for cleaning, painting, and inspection mainly depends on scaffoldings, gondolas and winch system. However, it is costly for such system upkeep. One possible solution is to develop autonomous robotic system. Our research team has a successfully developed a service robot that can remotely perform inspection and reparation of exterior pipes that are installed on the facades of the buildings in Hong Kong. The robot has demonstrated effective repair process on corroded pipes. However, the exiting service robot still requires the support of winch system or gondolas to hoist itself in the operation at high. Therefore, the objective of this project is to develop a portable and small-scale robotic climber to carry the service robot to the desired location for operation. The successful development of this new and robust climber will also bring significant benefit to other automatic and robotic system to facilitate their work at high.