A Comprehensive Review on Adsorption–Locomotion Codesign of Wall‐Climbing Robots for Complex Surface Operations

With the increasing demand for inspection, maintenance, and operation in vertical and complex‐geometry environments, wall‐climbing robots have become essential equipment for high‐rise infrastructure maintenance, large‐scale industrial inspection, and emergency response. The codesign of adsorption and locomotion is fundamental to ensuring reliable attachment, stable mobility, and robust environmental adaptability. This paper provides a comprehensive review of major adsorption mechanisms—negative pressure, magnetic adsorption, electrostatic adsorption, bioinspired dry adsorption, and mechanical interlocking—and examines their underlying dynamics. Typical locomotion architectures, including wheeled, tracked, legged, peristaltic, and flipping mechanisms, are compared in terms of mobility characteristics and application boundaries across different surface conditions. Key engineering advances are summarized, including adsorption–locomotion coupling, curvature‐conforming structures, tunable adsorption, lightweight design, multimodal integration, and intelligent control. Considering emerging application scenarios, such as offshore wind turbines and nuclear power facilities—where resistance to wind loads, radiation, corrosion, and cross‐medium operation are required—future research directions are identified, such as multimodal adsorption fusion, compliant structural materials, enhanced environmental perception, and adaptive motion planning. This review aims to provide coherent technical guidance for the development of next‐generation high‐reliability, high‐adaptability wall‐climbing robotic systems