Propeller-type Wall-Climbing Robots: A Review

Many efforts have been exerted in the robots field which have ability to climb vertical plane.` The result was various types of climbing robots. These robots have a mixture of different principles of adhesion and locomotion in many applications. Propeller thrust is one of the approaches that has been developed to generate the required adhesion force to enable the robot to climb walls. Due to the promising merits of this principle, the current paper deals with propellers-type wall-climbing robots (PRWCRs) and introduces features, applications and challenges for these robots. PRWCRs are examined depending on a set of given requirements. This mechanism has connected between two wide fields: wall climbing robots (WCRs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). For many reasons, each adhesion mechanism has more preference than others for a specific job; surface requirements are the main of them. Propeller-type WCRs are less affected by the nature of the surface, where it can climb many types of vertical planes: smooth, rough, and ferromagnetic or not. On the other hand, most of the introduced designs still have some problems and issues like transition operation, mission time and payload limitation.