Simulator for locomotion control of the Alicia³ climbing Robot

The climbing robot Alicia³, is mainly made of three identical modules linked together by two arms actuated by two air pistons. Each module consists of a cup, an aspirator, two wheels that are actuated by two DC motors with encoders and gearboxes, and four passive wheels to guarantee plain contact of the system on the wall. The cups can slide over a wall by mean of a special sealing maintaining the vacuum inside the cup and at the same time creates the right amount of friction according to the system weight and the target wall kind. This paper focuses on description of Alicia³ simulator, implemented in Simulink®, which allows testing locomotion and finding an adequate control parameters setting. A viewer, developed in Delphi™ 7 using Mex-function to integrate it in Simulink®, is used in order to visualize Alicia³ in 3D and the sequence of operations executed to follow the reference trajectory.