Development of Cleaning Module for Wall Climbing Drone with Bio-inspired Watering Mechanism

For many years, there has been significant progress in cleaning facilities in hazardous conditions using autonomous mechanical systems to keep humans away from potential danger. Especially, the cleaning method using a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) has attracted much interest in the robotics field due to its high degree of freedom in maneuverability; however, a UAV has a payload limitation. In this paper, we propose a cleaning module for a specific drone platform “CAROS-Q” that can tilt its pose to perch on walls or tilted surfaces. The proposed module includes bio-inspired water flow control mechanism from the peristaltic movement of the Esophagus for improving cleaning performance while minimizing the complexity and weight. By comparing the cleaning performance between the proposed module and dry brush cleaning, it was confirmed that the proposed module outperforms the counterpart for cleaning various contaminants.