Hanging-type wall climbing robot NOBORIN

Owing to the revision of Japanese building law in 2008, the demand for wall inspections has been increasing. Currently, wall inspections are performed by workers using hammering devices; this involves dangerous work at high elevations. Therefore, we developed an inspection system using NOBORIN®, a hanging-type wall climbing robot. In this paper, we introduce the robot and its hammering inspection system, and propose a method for image mosaicking and localization using images captured from an equipped camera. The estimated values are used to correct the elevation motion(s) of the robot.

1. [1] M. Masasawa, “Sound Percussion Inspection System by Drone,” J. of the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers, Vol.121, Issue 1200, pp. 28-29, 2018 (in Japanese).
2. [2] S. Nansai and R. E. Mohan, “A Survey of Wall Climbing Robots: Recent Advances and Challenges,” Robotics, Vol.5, No.3, 14, 2016.
3. [3] N. Geng, D. He, and Y. Song, “Camera Image Mosaicing Based on an Optimized SURF Algorithm,” TELKOMNIKA Indonesian J. of Electrical Engineering, Vol.10, No.8, pp. 2183-2193, 2012.
4. [4] P. F. Alcantarilla, A. Bartoli, and A. J. Davison, “KAZE features,” Proc. of European Conf. on Computer Vision, pp. 214-227, 2012.
5. [5] J. Engel, T. Schöps, and D. Cremers, “LSD-SLAM: Large-Scale Direct Monocular SLAM,” Proc. of European Conf. on Computer Vision, pp. 834-849, 2014.
6. [6] M. Tomonou and Y. Hara, “Current status and future prospects of SLAM,” Self-Location Estimation Technology for Mobile Objects: Special Issue on SLAM, Vol.64, No.2, pp. 45-50, 2020.