Magnetic wall and ceiling climbing robots have been proposed in many industrial applications where robots must move over ferromagnetic material surfaces. The magnetic circuit design with magnetic attractive force calculation of permanent magnetic wheel plays an important role which significantly affects the system reliability, payload ability and power consumption of the robot. In this paper, a flexible wall and ceiling climbing robot with six permanent magnetic wheels is proposed to climb along the vertical wall and overhead ceiling of steel cargo containers as part of an illegal contraband inspection system. The permanent magnetic wheels are designed to apply to the wall and ceiling climbing robot, whilst finite element method is employed to estimate the permanent magnetic wheels with various wheel rims. The distributions of magnetic flux lines and magnetic attractive forces are compared on both plane and corner scenarios so that the robot can adaptively travel through the convex and concave surfaces of the cargo container. Optimisation of wheel rims is presented to achieve the equivalent magnetic adhesive forces along with the estimation of magnetic ring dimensions in the axial and radial directions. Finally, the practical issues correlated with the applications of the techniques are discussed and the conclusions are drawn with further improvement and prototyping.
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