Glass Wall Cleaning Robot

Robotics, as always, is a hot choice for a mechanical engineering project. This project is about designing a wall climbing robot that can also clean external glass walls of highrise buildings. As you may know glass/window cleaning of high rise buildings is a very risky job and is also costly since it requires a lot of man power and supporting machinery.

The aim of this project is to design a window cleaning robot that can be used for commercial purposes.

Challenges:

• The robotic legs should offer good adherence to the surface of the glass even on 90+ degree vertical planes.
• The pressure created by the vacuum should be low enough to avoid any breakage of the glass window
• The system should be able to vacuum/un-vacuum its legs with good stability so as to fullfill its purpose; window cleaning.
• The design should be such a way that the cleaning mechanism has full access to the entire area under the robot so it misses no spots during cleaning.
• Design of an efficient cleaning fluid system.

This is not a working project but rather a 3D model design. Though you can attempt to make it a working project if you have the time, it is likely that you will have to spent more time of the electronics side of things. Instead of being automatic, though automatic is the commercially viable option, this wall cleaning robot is controlled via a remote controller where the operator stands at the top/terrace of the building.

The 3D model created for the robot is given below. It has a dimension of 500mmx1200mmx500mm. The robot has 6 legs, the front and back ones are used for motion and the center pair is used to keep it adhered to the glass surface in position. This robot can do only a straight line motion. The width of the I shaped sponge equals that of the outer lines of the legs so that it cleans the entire area under the robot without missing a spot.

This wall cleaning robot helps to automate the cleaning of windows and carry out their periodical inspection of office buildings. They can replace the conventionally used man power reducing both risks and costs.

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Cons:

• Manually operated
• The straight line motion may not work well with buildings that has angular glass walls.