CCRobot-IV-F: A Ducted-Fan-Driven Flying-Type Bridge-Stay-Cable Climbing Robot

A Flying-type cable climbing robot, CCRobot-IV-F, is presented in this paper. It is a climbing precursor of the fourth version of CCRobot, designed to surpass the abilities of previous robots with high climbing speed and obstacle-crossing capability. CCRobot-IV-F weighs less than 10 kg and a no-load speed of up to 4.5 m/s, which significantly exceeds that of other climbing robots. A dynamic model integrated with a cable-fixed coordinate system is developed, and a cascaded controller designed for stabilizing hover and climb with grippers, when a Global Positioning System and magnetometer are unavailable, is shown to work reliably in practice. Experimental results show that CCRobot-IV-F significantly improves the locomotive performance of CCRobot-IV, exhibiting fast speed, good payload capacity, and excellent obstacle-crossing capability. Moreover, CCRobot-IV-F is applied to a cable-stayed bridge in the field.