الفهرس 
Chapter 1 IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Introduction: Climbing robots have many applications in different civilian and industrial fields, such as inspection of highway bridges, steel structures, ship welding, nuclear power plant towers, petrochemical vessels and tanks. The access to these vessels is difficult for human, since they contain dangerous and harmful substances. The climbing robots are used also for cleaning the glass facades of high buildings, moreover they are used in the military, for surveillance and searching for explosive substances in hostile areas. All these applications are dangerous or difficult for the human, hence the necessity of using climbing robots is arising up. The research problem: The previous adhesion systems of the climbing robots were proposed to fit a certain type of surfaces or structures, for example, the magnetic adhesion can climb only the ferromagnetic surfaces, the vacuum chamber systems can climb only the flat and even surfaces, while the mechanical adhesion systems (i.e. grippers, claws, spines) are fitted to climb the rough and unstructured surfaces. Another issue that significantly features the need for the proposed climbing robot is the difficulties that face the petrochemical companies during the inspection processes of the vessels. These vessels need a novel robotic system to climb their cylindrical surfaces easily, and hence, facilitates safe inspection process for the human. Some of these vessels are made of the austenitic stainless steel which does not have a magnetic characteristic, so the magnetic adhesion means are not applicable here. Also, vacuum chamber systems are not applicable as well, because of obstacles and uneven surfaces inside the vessels. And then the research aims: to get a versatile climbing robot capable of climbing various structures easily and efficiently, regardless of their materials or terrains, moreover getting a simple and stable adhesion system. Steps of study: The scope of this thesis is proposing, designing, manufacturing, and testing a novel and versatile climbing robot called EJBot. The EJBot consists mainly of two coaxial upturned propellers mounted on a mobile robot with four standard wheels. The objectives of the research that presented in this thesis cover the following: 1.Mechanical design of the climbing robot (EJBot) with a novel hybrid actuation system. 2.Optimum structural design of the robot frame to decrease its weight as much as possible without losing the robot rigidity. Mathematical modelling of the robot. Checking the proposed adhesion idea success by the simulation work using MSC/ADAMS for dynamic simulation and Matlab/Simulink for control simulation. 3.Validating the simulation results with the experimental results of the manufactured robot. 4.Testing the robot in various climbing scenarios and on different surfaces. The study concludes: the importance of using the proposed propeller-type climbing robot and shows that EJBot outperforms many climbing robots in some aspects, such as generality of the climbed surface materials and terrains, its small size and weight. Moreover, it has a good maneuverability, capability to overcome significant obstacles and smooth transition between the ground and the walls. The experimental results show the ability of the robot to climb, explore, stop and move in arbitrary directions on the vertical structures and on the ceiling, as well as climb inner and outer cylindrical surfaces which emulates climbing industrial vessels.