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There are two challenges for wall-climbing robots in the maintenance and inspection of large vertical ferromagnetic structures: the requirement of high load capacity and the curved appearance of the wall. An improved magnetic crawler wall-climbing robot is presented in this paper. Without increasing the adhesion force, a load dispersion mechanism (LDM) is proposed to enhance the payload capacity of the crawler wall-climbing robot, through making full use of the magnetic adhesion force for resisting the overturning moment. Based on the passive independent suspension, a flexible connection scheme of the robot skeleton is proposed, that renders the wall-climbing robot move on the convex surface. Experiment results show that the magnetic crawler wall-climbing robot can perform locomotion well on a cylindrical wall whose curvature radius is 3000 mm. In the static state, the robot can afford 150 Kg payload which is 2.1 times of its mass. The LDM can reduce the requirement of magnetic adhesion force by 75% for resisting the overturning moment.

Wall-climbing robot, magnetic crawler, high payload, curved surface adaptivity