Glass facade cleaning robot with passive suction cups and self-locking trapezoidal lead screw drive

We report on the mechanism, design iteration, and performance of a new glass facade cleaning robot, vSlider. The passive suction cups, driven by self-locking lead screws, are used to engage the vSlider robot to the glass facade. This mechanism has higher efficiency, compared to active suction cups, and offers better power consumption and safety in the case of power disruption or power loss. Due to the self-locking leadscrews, the counter-moment in a static position is not transferred to the motor, and thus, the servos which drive the lead screws only consume the power needed for a typical free load. A DC motor with encoder generates the primary locomotion in vSlider which was tested both in position- and velocity-control modes. This paper also details the design iteration efforts and discusses the key findings from the experiments involving the first prototype, vSlider 1.x, and the application of these findings in the development of the second prototype, vSlider 2.x. Experiments were performed to validate the proposed design approach and to benchmark the performance of the two robot prototypes that were developed.