Different from the vehicles and robots that move on the ground, complex and nonlinear track–wall interactions bring considerable difficulties to the accurate control of tracked wall-climbing robots due to the effect of gravity and adsorption. In this article, the authors propose a trajectory-tracking control system for tracked wall-climbing robots based on the fuzzy logic computed-torque control (FLCT) method. A key element in the proposed control strategy is to consider the adsorption force and gravity compensation based on the dynamic model. Validated via numerical simulations and experiments, the results show that the proposed controller can track the reference trajectory quickly, accurately and stably.

Falls are a common risk and impose severe threats to both humans and humanoid robots as a product of bipedal locomotion. Inspired by human fall arrest, we present a novel humanoid robot fall prevention strategy by using arms to make contact with environmental objects. Firstly, the capture point method is used to detect falling. Once the fall is inevitable, the arm of the robot will be actuated to gain contact with an environmental object to prevent falling. We propose a hypothesis that humans naturally favour to select a pose that can generate a suitable Cartesian stiffness of the arm end-effector. Based on this principle, a configuration optimiser is designed to choose a pose of the arm that maximises the value of the stiffness ellipsoid of the endpoint along the impact force direction. During contact, the upper limb acts as an adjustable active spring–damper and absorbs impact shock to steady itself. To validate the proposed strategy, several simulations are performed in MATLAB & Simulink by having the humanoid robot confront a wall as a case study in which the strategy is proved to be effective and feasible. The results show that using the proposed strategy can reduce the joint torque during impact when the arms are used to arrest the fall.

In this paper, a crawler-type wall-climbing robot with negative pressure adsorption is designed. The dynamic model of the robot is established based on the method of discretizing the force load of the track shoe. The correctness of the kinematic model and dynamic model is proved by comparing two different ways of virtual prototype simulation and prototype experiment. According to the simulation results of the dynamic model and virtual prototype, the influence of design parameters on the motion performance of the wall-climbing robot is analyzed. The smaller the speed difference between the two tracks of the robot, the longer the gauge between the two tracks, and the greater the inclination of the adsorption wall, the larger the turning radius of the robot will be. The research content based on this paper can provide a new design optimization method and theoretical basis for improving crawler wall-climbing robots and crawler vehicles.

Dynamic unbalance force is an important factor affecting the service life of scrap metal shredders (SMSs) as the product of mass error. Due to the complexity of hammerheads arrangement, it is difficult to take all the parts of the hammerhead into account in the traditional methods. A novel optimization algorithm combining genetic algorithm and simulated annealing algorithm is proposed to improve the dynamic balance of scrap metal shredders. The optimization of hammerheads and fenders on SMS in this paper is considered as a multiple traveling salesman problem (MTSP), which is a kind of NP‐hard problem. To solve this problem, an improved genetic algorithm (IGA) combined with the global optimization characteristics of genetic algorithm (GA) and the local optimal solution of simulated annealing algorithm (SA) is proposed in this paper, which adopts SA in the process of selecting subpopulations. The optimization results show that the resultant force of the shredder central shaft by using IGA is less than the traditional metaheuristic algorithm, which greatly improves the dynamic balance of the SMS. Validated via ADAMS simulation, the results are in good agreement with the theoretical optimization analysis.