I-Corps: Roadmap to Commercialization of City-Climber Technology

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This Innovation Corps project proposes to test the commercial feasibility of a wall-climbing robot system based on the teams "City-Climber" technology for building façade inspection and glass wall cleaning applications. The current practice of manual inspection of building façade is time-consuming, expensive, and poses risk to human workers. The City-Climber technology provides a solution to meet a strong demand for automated inspection of building façades. In addition, the City-Climber robots can be modified to carry out tasks such as to clean glass walls and solar panels. Under prior funding, this team developed several wall-climbing robot prototypes, named City-Climber. Unlike traditional climbing robots that rely on magnetic devices and vacuum suction techniques and some recent novel climbing robots such as vortex climber and the robots using micro-spine inspired by the gecko foot, the City-Climber robots use an aerodynamic rotor package which achieves a balance between strong adhesion force and high mobility. If successfully commercialized, City-Climber robots have many potential applications such as: 1) inspection of building facades for cracks or other defects; 2) inspection of concrete structures such as power plant tower, dam, bridges, etc.; 3) cleaning of glass panels of high-rise buildings, 4) cleaning of solar panels; 5) inspection/spray painting/blasting of storage tanks, aircraft, ship hulls, billboards, etc.; 6) surveillance of tunnels or danger zones where ground access in not available.