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Duke Robot Climbs to Victory in Madrid
neutron_p writes "A wall-climbing, book-sized autonomous vehicle made by a Duke University team drove up a challenging vertical course to win first prize in an international competition in Madrid. Their robot Wallter was the only one that could start flat on the floor and climb the wall on its own, go over a barrier across the wall or stop itself after crossing the finish line."
I was initially excited about this tom-cruise rock climbing robot until I saw the photo, it is not only book sized, but book shaped too.
Anyhow, the article mentioned "tornado in a cup" technology - "Two vortexes swirl simultaneously, one in a spiral and the other in a toroidal path, like a donut. The forces generated hold the vehicle to the wall and yet allow free movement because the cup never touches the surface." Like a hovercraft that sucks?
However, later in the article, there was mention of magnets - "We tried a wheelie bar to keep the rear end of the robot flat against the wall and prevent the front from lifting up. Unfortunately, the results were disappointing. Time was running out so we had to add magnets and take advantage of the metal."
This makes me wonder if it's the magnets that hold the robot, or the new "tornado in a cup"?
--
Play iCLOD Virtual City Explorer and win Half-Life 2
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
go over a barrier across the wall or stop itself after crossing the finish line.
You mean and stop itself, right?
According to Burney, the Duke vehicle set itself apart when it rolled to the foot of a metallic wall, reared up on its hind wheels, and used a "tornado in a cup" to hug the wall and start its ascent...
Huh. Duke really does suck!
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
When will we see this as an add-on for the roomba? Then I could get all of the spiderwebs off of the walls and ceiling, and get the stairs done.
If we could get these little guys to crawl across the face of a render wall, pressing reset buttons as needed, then I'll be impressed.
;)
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Is that like Duke Nukem?
The device uses air currents swirling in a cylinder, about the size of an upside-down tuna can, to exert suction on a wall or ceiling.
How is the size of a tuna can any different just because it is upside-down?
make your own
google cache, since we would deestroy geocities
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I can suggest a few modifications.. water resistant, wifi and camera (with zoom), and cloaking.. then we'd really have a toy that would fly off the shelves. For men, anyway.. we shall call it the Lockerroom3000.
Okay, so we have the "tornado-in-a-cup" method used to scale the wall... But how did the other teams that they allude to being very good manage to walk up a wall? I'd be interested in a little more details. The article says the wall was metal. So you'd have to assume the other teams used magnets as well. But the article is very scant on details. Anyone else know more about the other teams/their entries/results?
Could this be the beginnings of a wall-painting robot? Painting is a tedious task and now that there is a wall climbing robot, I say duct tape a paintbrush to its ass!!
Jason Janet, an adjunct professor in Duke's electrical and computer engineering department and faculty advisor on the robotics project, said the Madrid competition shows the growing importance of climbing robots.
"Robots that climb walls and cross ceilings can go where humans can't," Janet said. "They can do security and safety jobs like looking for bombs or finding cracks in a support beam or the wing of a jumbo jet."
The Duke team's leader was Brian Burney, a staff member at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering and graduate student at North Carolina State University. The other team members were Pratt School undergraduates Kevin Parker, Andrew Meyerson and Julien Finlay.
"Our robot Wallter was the only one that could start flat on the floor and climb the wall on its own, go over a barrier across the wall or stop itself after crossing the finish line," Burney said.
Added Meyerson, "As the smallest, fastest and most novel robot, Wallter was one of the most popular exhibits. I was interviewed for Spanish national television for a story about the conference featuring the Duke robot."
According to Burney, the Duke vehicle set itself apart when it rolled to the foot of a metallic wall, reared up on its hind wheels, and used a "tornado in a cup" to hug the wall and start its ascent.
The "tornado" is generated by a patented device from Vortex HC, LLC of Morrisville, N.C., said Janet, who is vice president of development at the company. The device uses air currents swirling in a cylinder, about the size of an upside-down tuna can, to exert suction on a wall or ceiling. An impeller in the cylinder spins like a propeller but recirculates captive air rather than sucking air in one end and blasting it out the other.
"It's a tornado in a cup, but no ordinary tornado," Janet said. "Two vortexes swirl simultaneously, one in a spiral and the other in a toroidal path, like a donut. The forces generated hold the vehicle to the wall and yet allow free movement because the cup never touches the surface."
Parker said the Madrid competition required performing five tasks: starting on the metal competition wall and climbing as high as possible; climbing after the addition of randomly placed obstacles; crossing a barrier placed on the wall; starting from the floor and then climbing; and stopping after crossing the finish line.
"We faced stiff competition from German and Italian teams," Parker said. "The robot from the University of Catania was amazingly good at detecting and avoiding all the obstacles. Our robot brushed against a couple of obstacles, but it was the only one that completed all five tasks."
Janet said the Duke team combined the "tornado in a cup" technology with an original control system. "A human operates Vortex's commercial robots by remote control," Janet said. "The students added sensors and wrote software that enables their robot to operate on its own."
Parker said they added ultrasonic and infrared sensors across the front and programmed a tiny computer, called a microcontroller, to navigate based on information from the sensors. Ultrasonic sensors detect objects by bouncing sonar-like sound waves off them. Infrared sensors, used in television remote controls, detect light outside the range of human vision.
Burney provided an initial basic design for the Duke vehicle, Janet said. Meyerson and Parker, both biomedical engineering students, focused on writing software and incorporating the sensors.
When tests showed the centimeter-high barrier broke the hold of the Vortex technology, Janet called in Finlay to solve the problem of crossing the barrier without falling off the wall. Finlay is a mechanical engineering student and a veteran of the team that produced Duke's prize-winning autonomous underwater vehicle Charybdis.
Finlay said he tried to design a solution that would work with or without the metal wall at the competition.
"We tried adding treads," Finlay said. "We tried a wheelie bar to keep the rear en
They could sell them at Thinkgeek.
those guys are looking through a peephole into the girls' locker room. Seriously, the lower guy is about 3 inches from the machine.
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
There was very clear bias among the judges. I submitted an entry based on a highly advanced cybernetic robot made out of an empty egg carton, two cotton spools, some duct tape, mecano and a little girls pony tail. This very sophisticated device was then velcroed onto spidermans back.
My entry owned all the others when it came to the climbing competition, my entry was able to swing from wall to wall, hang from the ceiling and even managed to rescue a woman from a mugger while all the other entries could do was climb a few cm and fall off. Yet the judges refused to give me first prize. I have vowed never to return to Spain and hope to help humanity by using my robot to climb more walls.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
...Sarah Connor?
30+ comments and nothing about welcoming "wall climbing robot overlords"...
Are the cliche emitters of the world taking a nap or something? (Where such a comment puts me on the totem pole isn't worth discussing)
Robots that can climb walls and navigate; another enticing step on the road towards truly autonomous navigation. Good stuff. I just wish there weren't (approximately) a zillion steps left on said road.
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
So THATS what they did with their schools football budget!
The mentioned contest is CLAWAR 2004 - MADRID . (See hundreds of pictures if you wish).
It's part of CLAWAR Climbing and Walking Robots. As you can see, the mentioned robot had a very different design from the usual spider-like design.
I threw a glob of putty on the wall and filmed it sliming down. Then I played it backward at the competition. I almost won until those pesky kids with the talking dog exposed my cheating.
Table-ized A.I.
Instead of getting up and getting a beer from the fridge, very soon I'll be able to tell my robot to :
- Go to the fridge
- Climb up
- Open fridge door
- Grab a beer
- Climb down
- Go back to couh
- Open beer
- Give beer to me
Here it says:?Comercially available?
The "Duke Robotics Club", presently does not seem to have any info on this robot.
Those killer robots from the movie Runaway
"Jason Janet, an adjunct professor in Duke's electrical and computer engineering department and faculty advisor on the robotics project, said the Madrid competition shows the growing importance of climbing robots. "
... ie he thought that matrix multiplication wasn't associative (it is) because orthonormal matrices don't associate (they do). Also there was a question on a test on the periodicity of sum(u(kx+t)*e^-(kx+t),x = -inf...inf) where
I had two classes with Janet at Duke and got to see this technology in action. A special fan pushes air out across a surface sorta like a hover machine and the robot and surface attract due to the Venturi Effect. Pretty cool stuff really.
On a personal note though, Prof Janet was a pretty decent proffesor. Assignments were often open-ended and he tends to rely alot more on instinct than math though I think.
It might be because I have a good background in math but the most I remember about the class were the math arguments I got into with him
u(x)= x>0 ? 1 : 0. It took me a month to convince him the book he got it from was wrong and it actually was periodic.
Duke '03
These robots are sold commercially around the world. The climbing technology used is patented. More information can be found at http://www.vortexhc.com/
Oops--wrong forum.
Duke's Web site has more pictures and a longer article
ScienceSeeker.org
If it climbed high enough it could win the x-prise as well
Someone at Duke reads Judge Dredd comics.
Reading about this wonderful "patented tornado" which recirculates air, sounds like the Dyson vacuum cleaner, which uses the same technique to capture dust particles and hold them in the machine without having to use a filter-bag to catch them.
O N/HIST/DUALCYC
http://www.dyson.co.uk/nav/inpageframe.asp?id=DYS
I *really* don't understand patents in the US...
It's spelled feasible and yes it stands to reason that the completely unfeasible unsustainable Republicans would not know how to spell it.