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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"?
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Play iCLOD Virtual City Explorer and win Half-Life 2
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
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.
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?
No, use spraypaint... when is the robotic grafitti artist competition? This sounds like a Gibsonesque scenario... in the future, taggers will use teams of tiny robots to spraypaint the sides of large buildings!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
"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