[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kchwH-3tY0]
The Winboni is the first place winner in the International Student Design Competition of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Winboni is a small robot that cleans windows. That alone doesn’t set the robot apart. The fact that it is held on by suction is what distinguishes it. Running off AA batteries, this robot clings to the window as it cleans it with felt pads. It is hard to believe that this isn’t already a commercial product. Actually, we thought we had even seen it before, but we can’t find it now.
[via DVICE]
Cleaining eh’?
robots for what?
the best way to clean windows is to delete
the ntfs partition.
Anyone know which MSU they’re talking about?
Now all we need is a robot to clean the suction cup marks off
@crizo
Michigan state university.
@defyboy
this entire article is about the fact that it doesn’t use suction cups. Congratulations.
Didn’t try very hard -http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gravity-Wall-Climbing-Remote-Control/dp/B000P19YDI
@sean
I think they found that and linked to it on youtube. it looks like they meant a commercial vacuum powered window cleaner.
this robot sucks
@rasz: i lol’ed.
I watched the show oin Discovery Channel last night, was covering repairing a Ship Engine….had a huge magnetic one that stripped paint off of the hull of a cruise ship…..
Tom
While it is an interesting robot and I do take my hat off to it, its not exactly revolutionary, Its entertaining but its been done before. The most glaring hole in its pedigree in my book is what appears to be a basic stamp ….. personally won’t touch them with a 10ft pole.
They probably could have easily worked it out so it made it to the upper window, had they made their own board that was not unnecessarily garmongous. Tho not knowing the rules perhaps they were required to use some predetermined parallax components.
if they had an electrical engineer maybe they wouldnt have used a crappy Basic stamp and BOE board ;p
“if they had an electrical engineer maybe they wouldnt have used a crappy Basic stamp and BOE board ;p”
It’s true. Put a mechanical engineer and electronics in a room together and the only product will be sadness.
very nice! I would like to have one :-)
JESUS look at the bags under his eyes – The True sign of effort XD.
I would suspect it uses the batteries fast keeping the suction.
basic stamps aren’t all that bad. yeah they’re overpriced and slow, but if you just want to hack something simple you can’t beat ’em for easy development, and the little sip version bs1 is real convenient having the voltage regulator and reset circuit built onto a real package with nice big pins. that boe board though has no place off the proto bench.
Is it me or is alot of videos getting removed from youtube? I mean everyone posted on any forum, blog or digg are removed… :(
@hackfu,
If you’re talking about the hated message “We’re sorry, but this video is no longer available” or some such,
1. I complained about this to Hackaday three months ago, and they replied approximately, “Problem, what problem? The video is still there. Must be some problem with YouTube.”
2. My son showed me that Internet Explorer is fussy this way, and that Firefox will play a hugely larger percentage of YouTube videos. I FOUND THIS TO BE TRUE. Got me a copy of Firefox and now anytime I can’t see the YouTube video I copy the address, launch Firefox, paste the address and away I go, watching the video.
Wow… for an engineer she (Emily) was fairly cute ;-)
@scott b.
the point of me looking through these comments was to see if anyone else was going to state the obvious that the girl was cute in this video (i agree) also @previous comments in HS Adv. Electronics i used several BOE boards and they aren’t all that bad…i mean they got the job done here right?
@gyro_john
your still using IE? wow bud get on the FF bandwagon.
@captain obvious
On re-read you’re probably right but in my defense the original link mentions a product, links to a video of something and then says it couldn’t be found…..I should have read the bad copy more closely.
maybe magnet on other side of glass would work way better then suction, when you cleaning window you need to clean glass on both sides anyways right ?
Would be neat for a hi-rise that was all smooth on the outside. Only thing is some way to guarantee that it wouldn’t fall off and clonk somebody on the head.
Also would be cool to have a solar cell to keep the AAs charged up.
So, uh, how’s it get from window to window?
Whoa! thats the third actual robotic window cleaning thing ive seen in a couple of years. Ive seen one actually for high rise that moves up and down some safety ropes. And another automated one for residential. If these things really catch on they could put the window cleaning industry out of business.