Design of a Master-Slave Composite Wall Climbing Robot System for Penstock Assembly Welding

Nowadays, the penstock assembly welding of hydroelectric power stations is carried out by manual arc welding. In order to improve the working environment and raise the welding efficiency, this paper proposed a master-slave composite wall-climbing robot system based on gapped permanent magnet adhesion. With the master-slave composite design idea, the payloads of welding robot are shared and the flexibility and stability of the robot are improved. As a key mechanism of wall-climbing robot, the design and layout of the permanent magnetic adhesion module is studied. According to the result of static analysis and dynamic analysis of the welding robot, an optimized layout for adhesion module design is found. A Prototype of the robot system is built and experiments on the adhesion ability and motion ability of the robot system are carried out.