The study on the integrated control system for curtain wall building façade cleaning robot

Recently, with a growing number of high-rise buildings in cities, interest in building facade maintenance is increasing. The existing method of cleaning the exterior walls of existing high-rise buildings depended on the methods by workers who used ropes, gondolas, and winch systems. Recently, however, BMU (building maintenance unit) has been developed and applied to resolve safety problems and boost work efficiency. In Germany, USA, France and other countries, various types of robot systems for building façade maintenance are being applied. In South Korea, façade cleaning robots attached with curtain walls are also being developed. In this paper, we propose an integrated control system for the stable control of robots with the building façade cleaning technology. The proposed control system can be divided into three stages such as preparation stage, cleaning stage, and return stage. Each independent robot system performs tasks such as cleaning, moving, and obstacle detection according to each stage. A wireless communication system for stable communication between robots was proposed and applied for controlling the robot system. The proposed integrated control system was applied to building façade cleaning robots and its efficiency was verified compared with existing high-rise building cleaning methods.