Abstract: Wall-climbing robot used in the building wall surface quality inspection helps to improve efficiency and avoids personal risk, so a miniature wall-climbing robot based on the principle of negative pressure adsorption is presented to perform video detection on building walls. This robot can adapt to different types of wall materials, being capable of reliable suction and flexible moving on the wall. The robot platform system is described, the kinematics of the moving mechanism is analyzed, the principle of negative pressure suction is studied and thermodynamic theoretical model is proposed. Furthermore, by taking the effective negative pressure in chamber as design index, a robot-dedicated centrifugal impeller is designed, and the results are verified via computational fluid dynamics simulations. Finally, the small-sized prototype of the robot is developed, and the basic adsorption efficiency and integrated performance index of the robot are verified through tests in a bid to realize miniaturization of the robot volume, so that the ratio of payload to robot weight can be close to 4.0, thereby proving the correctness of the designs of impeller negative pressure system and moving mechanism.

Key words: Centrifugal impeller, Fluid dynamics, Negative pressure suction, Wall-climbing robot