The Alicia II and the Alicia3 systems are two climbing robot for inspection of vertical surfaces. To keep the operation of the system independent from the surface material (non-porous), pneumatic-like adhesion has to be used. The most common way to do this is by using suction cups and a vacuum generator. Such a kind of gripping system has normally to be mounted on a structure that is able to generate steps, because traditional suction cups cannot slide over the surface while attached. This kind of structure requires complex kinematics and actuators system and generally leads to slow and heavy robots. The main idea was to build a robot that is a suction cup itself that is able to slide over the wall surface while staying attached.
The structure of the Alicia II module is composed by a cup with 30 cm diameter. On-board is mounted a centrifugal aspirator and its electrical motor. The aspirator is used to depressurize the cup so the whole robot can adhere to the wall like a standard suction cup. The motor/aspirator set is a very robust one and is capable to work in very harsh environment. While the system has to move over the target surface, generally represented by rough metal surface or concrete wall, the cup must not adhere with high friction, so a particular kind of sealing between the wall and the robot has been realized. This configuration allows the robot to overcome obstacle of about 1 cm and to climb a vertical surface with a minimum curvature radius of 1.8 m. The whole structure has been designed to contain onboard two wheels with two independent DC motors/gearboxes/encoders. The total weight of the module is 4 Kg all included. The used DC motors/gearboxes are able to move a mass up to 6 Kg along a vertical direction with a maximum speed of 2 m/min.
The Alicia II robot has limited capabilities in passing over obstacles higher than about 1 cm. This limitation is mainly due to the maximum height of the flexible cup sealing that cannot be higher than a few centimetres. The basic idea for the Alicia3 robot is to use three of the Alicia II modules linked together in series by means of two rod, to allow the whole system to deal better with obstacles on the target surface.