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Tall buildings and hazardous utilities require regular inspection and maintenance to comply with the ordinance, and to ensure the integrity and safety. The traditional manual inspection and maintenance on tall building normally requires the installation of expensive scaffoldings or gondolas in which human operators need to work in mid-air and lifethreatening environment. Moreover, in some hazardous industries, such as nuclear, chemical and power generation, these maintenance tasks can be harmful and hazardous to human life and health. On the other hand, the reliability of the manual inspection approach is questionable because human judgement is always subjective. Consequently, the poor inspection result will deduce either excessive or inadequate repairing work that is undesirable in term of costing and safety. Over the years, a number of climbing robots have been developed for various building inspection and cleaning applications (Tso et al., 2000; Tso et al., 2001; Zhang et al., 2001; Hillenbrand et al., 2001; Sattar et al., 2001; Bahr & Yin, 1994; Wang & Shao, 1999; Minor et al., 2000; Luk et al., 2005; Luk et al., 2006). Beside the above development, the authors have also been requested by industry to develop a number of climbing robots cater for various maintenance tasks. These tasks are usually difficult and costly to be achieved by manual approaches. As buildings in many metropolitan cities like Hong Kong are getting taller and taller, the public concern for the safety of high-rise buildings and large structures is rising. Recently, the Hong Kong Housing, Planning and Land Bureau has just finished a public consultation on mandatory building inspection and intends to pass a legislation to enforce the mandatory inspection of all tall buildings aged 30 years or above. Other cities may have similar requirement in the future. As a result, there will be more and more demands to improve the accuracy and efficiency of building inspection and maintenance processes. It is a matter of fact that application of climbing service robots is one solution to service this purpose. In this chapter, WIC, SADIE and Robug III climbing robots developed by the authors will be described. WIC is a gondola-based climbing robot developed for inspecting tile-walls of high-rise buildings in Hong Kong. SADIE is a climbing robot with seven non-articulated legs developed for carrying out ultrasonic inspection and surface preparation inside reactor cooling gas ducts at Sizewell ‘A’ Power Station. Robug III is a walking and climbing robot O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w .ite ch on lin e. co m |
