WALL CLIMBING ROBOT uses SUPERSONIC GRIPPERS
enjoy out Spidey, there’s a new wall climber in town!
Researchers [Matthew Journee, XiaoQi Chen, James Robertson, mark Jermy, and Mathieu Sellier] recently unveiled their wall climbing wonder bot at the 2011 IEEE international conference on Robotics and Automation. like a lot of other wall climbing bots, theirs operates on the Bernoulli principle to keep it stuck to the surface, but that’s where the similarities end.
Unlike other Bernoulli-based climbers, this robot’s gripper never actually touches the surface it is climbing. The researchers were able to accomplish this feat by creating a specialized gripper which forces air through a 25 μm gap, creating a very powerful low pressure vortex. The gripper’s design compresses the air by shape alone, causing the air flow to reach speeds of Mach 3, without counting on powerful pumps or boosted air volume.
The researchers state that their supersonic gripper can support about five times the weight of a conventional Bernoulli gripper, and as you can see in the video below it also has no problem climbing a large variety of surfaces.
Window-washing Roomba, here we come!
[via Make]