PI: Dr Mohan Rajesh Elara
Collaborator: Dr Tan Ning
Worldwide, city skylines are increasingly dominated by multi-storey buildings with glass facades. The process of cleaning them have remained more or less the same: they are labor intensive and often dangerous, especially in adverse weather and wind conditions. There is hence a recent trend to develop and deploy robotic systems for cleaning vertical glass facades in skyscrapers. However, numerous research challenges remain that are associated with mechanism design, safety, autonomous capabilities, and human robot interaction. In this project, we are developing a new class of nested reconfigurable glass facade cleaning robots, V-Tetros, to overcome these challenges. Our novel design utilizes individual robots with distinctive reconfiguration characteristics (intra-reconfigurability) capable of combining with other homogeneous/ heterogeneous robots (inter-reconfigurability). The project is set to make significant research contribution in the areas of reconfigurable design, modular mechanisms, control, and human robot interaction.
