students overlooking their rope-traversing robots

Crawler Challenge: Building Rope-Traversing Robots

December 23, 2024 by 4 Comments

Rope-climbing robots are the stuff of engineering dreams. As kids, didn’t we all clutter our family home with constructions of towers and strings – Meccano, or Lego – to have ziplines spanning entire rooms? Good for the youngsters of today, this has been included in school curricula. At the University of Illinois, the ME 370 students have been given the task of building a robot that can hang from a rope and walk across it—without damaging the rope. The final projects show not only how to approach tricky design problems, but also the creative solutions they stumbled upon.

Imagine a tiny, rope-climbing walker in your workshop—what could you create?

The project is full of opportunities for those thinking out of the box. It’s all about the balance between innovation and practicality: the students have to come up with a solution that can move at least 2 meters per minute, fits in a shoebox, and has some creative flair—no wheels allowed! The constraints provide an extra layer of challenge, but that’s where the fun lies. Some students use inverted walkers, others take on a more creature-like approach. The clever use of motors and batteries shows just how far simple tech can go when combined with a bit of engineering magic.

This project is a fantastic reminder that even small, seemingly simple design challenges can lead to fascinating creations. It invites us adults to play, and by that, we learn: a win-win situation. You can find the original article here, or grab some popcorn and watch the video below.

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Lego Ziplining Robot Climbs For Claps

September 28, 2020 by 10 Comments

The internet has given us plenty of cool robotics projects, but we don’t think we’ve seen one zipline before. At least not until now.

This cool little ziplining robot is courtesy of the folks over at [Tart Robotics]. As they described it, the robot moves using a 4-bar linkage mechanism with the motor’s torque “transferred to the arm mechanisms through a pair of bevel gears and a worm drive.” Even cooler, the robot is activated by clapping. The faster you clap, the faster the robot moves. That’s sure to wow your friends at your next virtual hacker meetup.

They had to do a bit of custom 3D printing work to get a few of the Lego components to connect with their non-Lego off-the-shelf bits, so that took a bit of time. Specifically, they had some cheap, non-branded DC motors that they used that did not naturally mate with the Lego Technic components used to create the rest of the robot’s body. Nothing a few custom 3D printing jobs couldn’t solve.

It always amazes us what cool contraptions you can put together with a few Lego blocks. What’s your favorite Lego project?

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The Drone That Flies In Any Orientation

April 14, 2020 by 8 Comments

Modern radio-controlled multi-rotor drone can be incredibly agile, but can only make orientation changes around the yaw axis while remaining in approximately the same position. Researchers at ETH Zurich have again built and tested multirotor with controllable motion six degrees of freedom, this time dramatically improving efficiency.

We covered a similar design from ETH Zurich previously which was hexacopter with arms with limited rotation. This new design is also a hexacopter, but with 2 coaxial motors on each rotating arm. Each arm has an increased range of rotation over the previous design, beyond 360 degrees. With the range of rotation and the very complex control system, the drone can efficiently fly in any orientation, while still being able to apply effective torque or linear force in any direction. This opens up a lot of possibilities for tasks that drones can perform, like close-up industrial inspection, using tools or pulling cables while keeping the rotors clear.

The arms do have a limited amount of rotation before winding the motor cable tight, but the control system keeps track of this and can unwind during or after movement. See the video after the break to see it in action. The complete scientific paper is not light reading, but definitely interesting. We’re looking forward to seeing if and when these type designs get used in real-world applications.

There are without a doubt a lot of drones in our future, and probably the most successful project to date is the Zipline fixed-wing drones in Rwanda and Ghana, which have made over 35000 deliveries of emergency medical supplies since 2016.

Thanks [Qes] for the tip!

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Automate The Freight: Medical Deliveries By Drone

May 12, 2017 by 26 Comments

Being a cop’s kid leaves you with a lot of vivid memories. My dad was a Connecticut State Trooper for over twenty years, and because of the small size of the state, he was essentially on duty at all times. His cruiser was very much the family vehicle, and like all police vehicles, it was loaded with the tools of the trade. Chief among them was the VHF two-way radio, which I’d listen to during long car rides, hearing troopers dispatched to this accident or calling in that traffic stop.

One very common call was the blood relay — Greenwich Hospital might have had an urgent need for Type B+ blood, but the nearest supply was perhaps at Yale-New Haven Hospital. The State Police would be called, a trooper would pick up the blood in a cooler, drive like hell down I-95, and hand deliver the blood to waiting OR personnel. On a good day, a sufficiently motivated and skilled trooper could cover that 45-mile stretch in about half an hour. On a bad day, the trooper might end up in an accident and in need of blood himself.

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