A wire suspended mechanism with tension control and its application to a bathroom-cleaning robot are presented. A compact and small size robot is designed using the wire suspended mechanism. Four wires suspend the robot main body from four upper corners of a bathroom. Handling the length and tension of the four wires, the robot cleans the wall of the bathroom. Power unit and computer system are placed on a floor separate from the robot main body. It is required to keep the robot main body even with the floor in order to clean the wall. The leveling control of the robot main body using a wire tension control is proposed. The tension-detecting unit proposed in this paper uses a simple lever type mechanism. The validity of the proposed tension control has been confirmed by the experimental and simulation results.
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