Development of Wall-climbing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle System for Micro-Inspection of Bridges

Abstract

The field of research for bridge inspection using a UAV has gradually been developed to meet human needs. The UAV-based inspection system can be classified into contact-type and non-contact-type inspection depending on the purpose of the tests. In this paper, we propose a contact-type UAV system that can move close to the surface for micro inspection of the bridge. In the early development of CAROS (Climbing Aerial Robot System), the platform was depending on thrust and friction force, which leads to a limitation that it was difficult to obtain the force required for wall movement under the low friction coefficient. To compensate for this, we introduce the enhancement of CAROS, which has improved the shortcomings of dependence on the wall friction force by applying an auxiliary arm and a tilt-rotor mechanism and changing the direction of propulsion. The proposed system is prototyped and the climbing ability on the wall, with and without obstacles, in various slopes is validated.