People like good natured rivalry. Have a design competition and see how many challenges are over come. At this year's Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots and the Support Technologies for Mobile Machines in Paris, France, a little robot turned a few heads.
The bot, dubbed Paraswift, was designed to handle a challenge of climbing a vertical wall and dropping down unharmed. Paraswift's designers at Disney Research and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) used the properties of a terror inducing tornado to handle half of the challenge. The team creates a vortex inside the robot, where the low pressure center of the funnel "glues" the robot to its surface.
"It's like a mini tornado within the robot." - ETH team member Lukas Geissmann
Disney Research's Paul Beardsley explained, "The big benefit of this is that you don't need to have a seal between the physical robot and the wall because the vortex forms its own seal around the low-pressure area." This gives the robot clearance for rough or uneven surfaces.
The robot then descends via a parachute that open when it is time to fall back to the ground. Although part of the programming, the team wants to implement a system to deploy the parachute when an accidental fall is detected.
The bot itself appears to create its own vortex internally, which gives it a clear superiority over another air based climbing robots of the past. The team will continue to innovate and giving a foundation for everyone who follows.
Eavesdropper
