Design of Window-Cleaning Robotic Manipulator With Compliant Adaptation Capability

The number of high-rise buildings is increasing worldwide, and the demand for window maintenance and cleaning has increased accordingly. However, there is an increased desire to substitute robots with human workers because of the occurrence of many accidents. Although many window-cleaning robots have been developed, almost all the robots cannot passively pass obstacles on the outer walls of buildings. In this article, a window-cleaning robot is provided with compliant adaptation capabilities by adding series elastic actuators and tristar wheels to an older window-cleaning robot. This robot has a two-degree-of-freedom manipulator, and the robot can passively overcome obstacles without any need for control. An optimization is performed for the manipulator, and the experiments are performed with the manipulator to compare the respective abilities to overcome the obstacles using parameters before and after the optimization. In addition, a cleaning module is constructed by scaling down the previous model. The performance of the downscaled cleaning module is validated using a window-cleaning experiment.