Façade Cleaning Robot With Manipulating and Sensing Devices Equipped on a Gondola

Façade cleaning of high-rise buildings requires automation due to the risk and inefficiency of a fall accident for human workers. Recently, due to the need for automation, various types of façade cleaning robots have been developed. In our previous study, the gondola-mounted type cleaning robot was developed, and it showed several issues. In this article, we propose an improved design feature to solve the issues. First, we modularized the robot design for lightweight and maintainability. Second, we implemented passive obstacle overcoming mechanism with tri-star wheel and compliant manipulator for minimizing uncleaned area near obstacles. Third, we developed the position sensing device for measurement and compensation of lateral disturbance occurred by swinging gondola. To verify the cleaning performance of the robot, experiments were conducted with different scenarios of cleaning general plane surface, obstacle overcoming, and lateral disturbance applied and compensated. Experimental results of both lab test and field-test performed on a real-world building were analyzed and summarized in this article.