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Scaling Walls With Suction Cups
tedtarg writes "What will those clever Germans think of next? The BBC has a story
on a cool device called a gekkomat. Basically a set of suction cups that let u crawl up the side of buildings... Definitely a good tool for Batman to emulate Spiderman." Scaling walls is a good super power. Now lets get on scaling buildings in a single bound.
Hmm... anyone who works anywhere with a reasonable size data center has access to floor pullers. You could just grab a couple of those and have at!
:)
And when it's late and you start getting punchy, you really do think of things like this...
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I used to live in stormy waters, just dying of fright,
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Line from the song Suction Cup 6.1 by Sofina on mp3.com. Great tune.
(Nope, I'm not in the band, but they're local to my area and they're pretty darn good).
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Sorta brings a whole new level of meaning to the term Blue Screen Of Death, doesn't it?
I'd be seriously worried about any highrise window that couldn't support a mere 230 pounds. Consider that such windows (especially the near-floor to ceiling type) have to be proof against people accidentally falling against them, and even more, proof against pressure differentials (in either direction) caused by high winds. For, say, a 5ft by 5ft window, a mere 1/10th PSI pressure differential gives you 360 pounds of force on the window -- and pressures can be quite a bit higher than this with a good wind.
Now, true enough, windows have been known to pop off of highrises in strong winds (ouch!) but rarely, and that in newer buildings where installation was sloppy.
But this whole suction cup thing has been done in countless movies and old Mission: Impossible episodes using the two-suction-cups-and-a-handle device used for pulling floor tiles in raised-floor computer rooms.
-- Alastair
one word: parachute.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Always trying to be the superior race... First the cool pogo stick boots that let you run 45mph and jump 6 feet high, and now the ability to climb buildings. What's next? Heat vision, X-ray boobie sight, flight, invisibility?
:)
Someone stop the flow of DC and Marvel publications into that country.
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The Quicktime video (Sorenson?) showing the Gekkomat in action with someone scaling a wall is here.
It's a 4.2 MB file, which I haven't had any luck playing yet.
Alex T-B
St Andrews
Yeah, really! No mechanical technology like this is perfect, any more than the outsides of buildings are uniform or nececcarily able to stand the kind of shear forces this must generate.
It looks cool, but it strikes me as dangerous as hell - there's no way I'd personally try it.
Imagine if the AYBABTU trolls get ahold of this. All Your Base will no longer be limited to the online world--we'll see it on the side of buildings, hanging from bridges, everywhere.
Then there's the peeping tom factor. One could scale Natalie Portman's apartment buildings, peeking through cracks in curtains...
It's a great day for the trolls, and a sad day for the Rest of Us.
Saw "Geekomat" instead of "Gekkomat"?
It's "geekomatic" !
Gods. I need more coffee, methinks.
Best Slashdot Co
blue scream of death, perhaps?
Best Slashdot Co
My daughter was doing that in Spy Fox: Dry Cereal months ago. Oh, wait, that's just a game.
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Hang from the celing of your boss's office. Spy on meetings.
Hang from celing of womens bathroom. Find out why they always take so long.
Hide from/ambush DBA's who want to work you to death 5 minutes before you leave.
Get a extremely large set of these, attach entire desk to celing. Work inverted all day long. pass out.
attach to airplane before takeoff. Free trip, anywhere. Hint: dress warmly, carry a parachute, just in case..
Climb buildings, save kitties, become hero of many young children.
Climb kitties, save buildings, $%*@* off PETA.
paint body like lizard. spend entire day on wall, sticking tonge out at people.
It could tell you to press your lips against the building and suck like hell!
In today's news, a German corporate spy plunged 108 stories to his death while attempting to scale New York's World Trade Center in efforts to steal business plans.
Spectators were stunned to see the German who has been identified as Wolfgang Dirk Schmidt yelling "Arschlock!!" while falling to his death.
Investigators used shovels to scoop up his remains for analysis at Quantico VA, in efforts to present a case against the German goverment for inventing what they dub as "suction cups of mass destruction."
Stay tuned
Want Root?
Since Hilda used to be a circus performer, she obviously didn't need the suction cups.
Next they'll develop telepathic powers with which to communicate with Creatures of the Sea, and claim they're all innovative.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
There's been a device like that for ship hull cleaning for years. It's lowered over the side, and works its way down and across, doing the chip and paint jobs ships require. It can even be used at sea on calm days when the ship is moving slowly. It beats being lowered over the side in a bosun's chair.
A well known BBC television program....
Links
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
Or activists could use it to get *into* company meetings!
I loved this part:
"If irregularities should occur despite intensive safety measures
which are built into the machine, error codes are displayed and alternatives
to solve the situation are offered by the computer."
I can see it now, halfway up the Empire State Building: Poor suction detected. Please shutdown and perform a check-disk.
Seriously, when you're halfway up a building and not generating enough suction, what suggestions can the computer offer other than "pray!" ???
The ACME company has developed new rocket-powered skates which can propell people at amazing speeds. ACME wanted to warn potential users not to use the device on curved roads near cliffs, due to numerous accidental coyote deaths.
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
Yes, I know it's far fetched....but would you not have said the same about a hyperlink being considered a violation?
It could be a burgular tool.
Just food for thought.
Fight Spammers!
Yaaaaawwwn....
/.'s popularity has not grown because of its dedication to "grown up" presentation.
I really hope you don't read /. to stay on top of the technical world. /. was created to be an online community/forum for things that interested a stereotyped community, commonly refered to as geeks.
So read Ars and stop complaining. Stick to sites with are concerned with presenting material in a grown up way. Read the Wall Street Journal.
Come on, you have to admit,
Ask yourself: Do nerds not have a sense of humor? Or is it just you?
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
It would have been much cooler if instead of using a vacuum approach, they'd tried to replicate a real gecko's (almost fractal) micro cillia. The reason gecko's can walk on walls (and ceilings) is that it's feet are covered in microscopic fibres (covered in even more microscopic fibres, branching to every more microscopic fibres). "Gecko Samui" - best surf clothing on ChaWeng Beach, Koh Samui, Thailand.
+++ BASELINE REALITY FAILURE+++ +++ PLEASE REBOOT UNIVERSE +++
Just keep your eyes open for Clouseau. He is obviously some kind of genius to be so unpredictable!
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/sci/tech/newsid_ 673000/673265.stm
Tom.
Oh arse
I wonder what you start thinking when you get stuck up 5 floors high, with nobody to see you and no battery life... for the whole night!!! That would be almost like this guy from Darwin awards who went flying on the chair.
P.S. My Casio camera sucks batteries even faster than this device.
[Offtopic]Casio's technical support should receive pine-apples up their asses every hour. They are the most incompetent bunch of freaks I know. 24 hours on the phone - result 0%.
http://dtum.livejournal.com
Oh, I don't know... I bet it gets pretty graphic when the person detaches from the building forty stories up.
No relation to Happy Monkey
Re: Supporting two people at once, plus equipment.
At the heart of the system are the suction cups, each of which can hold 250 kilograms (550 lbs).
The suction cups (all four will support ~one ton. Allowing for one failing to get proper suction, and one disengaged during moviement, you've still got ~ 1000lbs of support, plenty for carrying two large people and several hundred pounds of equipment.
Re: Weight supported by 'Gekkonaut'. The climber is only supporing his weight and the weight of the backpack gear (66 lbs), as the suction cups support themselves. During movement, the climber must also support the weight of one 'sucker'. Hard to operate and carry a person down? Yes. But if it's your only/best option, I could see it working.
Re: Why doesn't system auto-disengage available sucker? That sounds like a bad idea. Like rock climbing, this probably takes a bit of concentration, and you don't want a suction cup suddenly letting go of the wall when you're not expecting it (e.g. when you're planning your next move up a burning building's wall).
Ignoring that, my prediction is that this will be the hot 'must-have' toy this christmas. I know I want one!
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
TW, a show here in the UK, had these on the other day. Quite cool, imo. They had a stunt man try them out, and he managed to climb 20 metres wearing them. Apparantly they're really heavy though - so i'd put the spider-man suit back in the closet, taco :)
i wish i was but oh well
....and BASE jumpers everywhere rejoiced at the idea of climbing such great treasures as, the World Trade Center, The Arch, and other such "natural" landmarks.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Now I can take up the respected trade of David Niven in all those wonderful movies about the French Rivierra.
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There isn't much chance a fireman or whatnot is going to carry someone on their back down the face of a building with one of these things. Combined with their fire gear the weight of these items is just a bit on the high side.
Regardless I think they are neat, but I see a bigger use in inspection and construction than rescue.
Another point, why do they need the lcd displays at all? Why can't a processor simply determine if there are enough currently active supports to allow movement of any specific one? I think with some coaching and computer assist you could actually increase your ascent. Basically the computer would free the pad it wants you to move next, with enough practice you should be able to move quicker.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I used fireman as I have a relative who is one. He has two main gripes about firefighting.
Weight of gear, and the heat because of the gear (as in you can sweat so much you pass out) - he understands the tradeoff... cause he still has his skin.
the issue is that these pads might be able to support the weight of two humans, but the human scaling the building still has to be able to do the same. That is why all rescues involve rescurers who are not required to use their strength to support both people!. At worse their strength is needed to support the person they are rescuing.
next is the fact that he has his own weight to contend with, this is not the same as standing on the ground. I don't know about you, but I guarantee it will get tiring moving those pads, and that doesn't count fact it has ZERO backup safety that cable suspended rescue persons have or those on high extension ladders... you will still need a cable suspended from above to make this acceptable to recue people
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
There appears to be a mirror here for when this site gets slashdotted.
Geckos don't have suction cups. The clinging they do to walls is done by microscopic hairs on their feet. The hairs allow them to go up textured walls in addition to glass (even glass has tiny imperfections).
I'd love to see the window cleaner using this equipment when it starts to rain and his suction cups slide down the glass from his weight. Interesting technology, I admit, but I'll stick to scaffolding and ladders for all my wall-climbing needs.
The power for the vacuum is a tank of compressed air. That's a fairly good energy source, and there is a lightweight and no-moving-parts way of turning it into vacuum (a Venturi). So it's got lots of vacuum, at least for a little while. Then you use a _big_ soft rubber pad and there won't be that much air leaking in from the edges even on a stubbly surface. Exterior building materials aren't going to be so porous that you can actually pull air through the bulk material. But I do think that on a brick, concrete, or stucco surface your time will be pretty limited. And always have safety lines; you could easily pull a window right out of the building, or wind up falling with a layer of paint or stucco still adhering to your pads.
I'm kind of surprised it took 40 posts before this came up. Glass is actually pretty strong, as long as the load is spread out so it doesn't initiate a crack. Those pads spread it out plenty, and the force is mostly downwards along the pane (the strong way). But I'd worry about how the window is mounted. You'd pretty obviously pull the average house window right out of the frame. On tall buildings, the glass is thick because the high winds you get at altitude can push against a big window with a force of a few hundred pounds. But the frame has to allow the glass some freedom to move, otherwise building sway can break windows and drop them on passersby. (The John Hancock building in Chicago was once notorious for falling glass; I'm not sure if it was due to too-thin panes or improper mounts.) So I think there's a chance that the guy scaling the glass building in the picture is going to wind up hanging from his safety ropes, still attached to a big thick glass rectangle.