Experimental Comparison of Two Ceiling Hanging Mobile Robots Through Real Prototypes Development

The purpose of this paper is to develop a ceiling hanging mobile robot for factories, offices and living spaces where human and robots can share spaces cooperatively. Based on an analysis of related work, we select two promising candidates of ceiling attachment method; a permanent magnet method and a mechanical constraint method. We combine these two ceiling attachment methods with practical locomotion methods, and realize two ceiling hanging mobile robots. Two different robots are designed and implemented based on our selected approaches. We evaluated the basic performances of those two robots in experiments. Difficulties in their design and implementation processes of the two robots are described, and technical insights are summarized based on the comparison of difficulties, safety, performance and cost. Discussions reveal that the two robots have quite different characteristics. In conclusion, two different application areas are proposed for the two robots with different ceiling attachment methods. Although there are large numbers of reports on wall climbing or ceiling hanging mobile robots, this paper is the first work, to our knowledge, to compare qualitatively and quantitatively the performances of multiple robots through development of real prototypes.