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Introduction: Climbers sometimes support their body with one finger hooked on a rocky ledge. This peculiar manoeuvre may cause a characteristic injury of the flexor tendon sheath, named "climber's finger".

Symptoms: (1) A sharp pain when grasping, and a sudden "snap" sound and snapping phenomenon in the concerned fingers and (2) a tender palpable mass proximal to the PIP joint.

Mechanism of occurrence: When a finger forms a hook, the highest stress point of the flexor tendon sheath is between the first cruciform pulley and the second annular pulley. When the full body weight is held mainly with the weak first cruciform pulley, it sometimes ruptures.

Therapy: Conservative therapy to prevent bowstringing was applied for eight cases. Six patients recovered after three months; the other two cases underwent operations.

Conclusion: If conservative therapy is found to be ineffective after three months, suturing of the tendon sheath should be indicated for climber's finger.

The interest in the development of climbing robots is growing rapidly. Motivations are typically to increase the operation efficiency by obviating the costly assembly of scaffolding or to protect human health and safety in hazardous tasks. Climbing robots are starting to be developed for applications ranging from cleaning to inspection of difficult to reach constructions. These robots should be capable of travelling on different types of surfaces, with varying inclinations, such as floors, walls, ceilings, and to walk between such surfaces. Furthermore, these machines should be capable of adapting and reconfiguring for various environment conditions and to be self-contained. Regarding the adhesion to the surface, they should be able to produce a secure gripping force using a light-weight mechanism. This paper presents a survey of different applications and technologies proposed for the implementation of climbing robots.

The contribution of this paper is to present a small and lightweight ape-like robot, Aim of this project is to build a robot that is capable to walk adequately on two and four legs, change from a four-legged posture to a two-legged posture, has the possibility to manipulate small objects, and is able to climb. The ape species Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus were chosen as an antetype for our robot. LittleApe is modelled with the same proportions regarding limb length, spinal column, center of mass, walking pattern, and range of motion. Due to the fact that it is faster to implement a simulation model than to build the robot, we are testing our approach in simulation while building the real system.

A Magnetic Switchable Device (MSD) is a ferromagnetic circuit using permanent magnets where the flux can circulate between different paths when its configuration is changed. This routes or cancels the flux trough specific surfaces, and thus turns on or off adhesion forces. We present classic and innovative magnetic configuration to realize powerful MSD. We designed and prototyped some miniature systems and give their characteristics. Finally various robotics applications for gripper, anchor and climbing robot are unveiled where the MSD solution has proved to be advantageous.

Cy-mag^3D is a miniature climbing robot with advanced mobility and magnetic adhesion. It is very compact: a cylindrical shape with 28 mm of diameter and 62 mm of width. Its design is very simple: two wheels, hence two degrees of freedom, and an advanced magnetic circuit. Despite its simplicity, Cy-mag^3D has an amazing mobility on ferromagnetic sheets. From an horizontal sheet, it can make transition to almost any intersecting sheet from 10° to 360° – we baptise the last one surface flip. It passes inner and outer straight corners in any almost inclination of the gravity. Cy-mag^3D opens new possibilities to use mobile robots for industrial inspection with stringent size limitations, as found in generators. A patent is pending on this system.

Magnetic wheels are a powerful solution to design inspection climbing robots with excellent mobility. Magnetic wheels optimization based on simulations and the results that were obtained on prototypes are presented. The measured adhesion was doubled between the classic configuration and a novel multilayer one sharing exactly the same four magnets and the same total volume of iron. This know-how is then applied to optimize magnetic wheels for the existing robot called MagneBike. The adhesion force has been multiplied by 2 to 3 times depending on the conditions. Those amazing improvements open new possibilities for miniaturization of climbing robots or payload's increase.

This paper presents the mechanical construction of a climbing robot with wheeled locomotion and adhesion through permanent magnets. This machine is intended to be used in the inspection of different types of ferromagnetic structures, in order to, for instance, detect weaknesses due to corrosion, particularly in fuel tanks, ship hulls, etc. The vehicle will have a semi-autonomous behaviour, allowing a remote inspection process controlled by a technician, this way reducing the risks associated with the inspection of tall structures and ATEX places. The distinguishing characteristic of this robot is its dynamic adjustment system of the permanent magnets in order to assure the machine adhesion to the surfaces, even when crossing irregular and curved surfaces.

This paper utilizes a 2D laser range finder (LRF) to determine the behavior of a walking robot. The LRF provides information for 1) obstacle/gap detection as well as 2) terrain classification. The obstacle/gap detection is based on an edge detection with increased robustness and accuracy due to customized pre and post processing. Its output is used to drive obstacle/gap avoidance behavior or climbing behavior, depending on the height of obstacles or the depth of gaps. The terrain classification employs terrain roughness to select a proper gait with respect to the current terrain. As a result, the combination of these methods enables the robot to decide if obstacles and gaps can be climbed up/down or have to be avoided while at the same time a terrain specific gait can be chosen.