Facade climbers for cleaning and inspection

The trend of using glass as material for facade construction requires intelligent cleaning solutions. Due to increasing automation, more and more automated or even autonomous cleaning robots are wanted. However, the diversity of facade types often requires special solutions with accordingly high development costs. A unit assembly system for facade cleaning robots would reduce those development costs. This paper shows the difficulties emerging from the development of such a unit assembly system and proposes its structure. The so called caterpillar kinematics exemplifies this structure and will be introduced as an example in this paper.