To solve the global path for a biped wall-climbing robot in a 3D wall environment

a planning method combining wall transition analysis

searching of global wall sequences

and optimization of adhesion points when performing wall transitions is proposed. Firstly

to obtain the feasibility for the biped wall-climbing robot to transit between walls

the robot’s reachable workspace and the wall are simplified to transform the problem into a geometric intersection test. Then

the global wall sequence is found by using a graph search method. Finally

to obtain the optimal global path

a mathematical model is established to compute the optimal adhesion point for transiting between adjacent walls. A biped wall-climbing robot

named W-Climbot

is used for simulation. The simulation results show that the proposed method takes only 2ms on average to analyze the feasibility of transition between different walls and search the global wall sequence in a three-dimensional environment composed of 5 to 20 walls. The success rate to obtain the optimal global path is 95%

and the average time consumed is less than 4s. This method can provide optimized global paths for biped wall-climbing robots and lay a foundation for motion planning.