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Robotics

Duke Robot Climbs to Victory in Madrid 96

Posted by CmdrTaco from the but-drew-says-duke-sucks dept.
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."
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Duke Robot Climbs to Victory in Madrid More

Duke Robot Climbs to Victory in Madrid

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  • Book shaped robot (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fembots ( 753724 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @03:28PM (#10726991) Homepage
    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 [iclod.com] and win Half-Life 2

  • slashdot editing (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    go over a barrier across the wall or stop itself after crossing the finish line.

    You mean and stop itself, right?

    • Re:slashdot editing (Score:2, Informative)

      by Whalou ( 721698 )
      This quote is taken directly from the article and accurate.
    • The way I read the sentence is that it was the only robot that was able to do any one of those things. So, the rest of the robots completely failed to successfully complete any one of those tasks. Apparently a dominating performance.

  • More than just a cliche! (Score:5, Funny)

    by American AC in Paris ( 230456 ) * on Thursday November 04, 2004 @03:31PM (#10727027) Homepage
    From the article:

    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...

    ..."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."

    Huh. Duke really does suck!

  • attachment for the roomba? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Over_and_Done ( 536751 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @03:33PM (#10727037)
    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.

  • Useful on a render wall.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by myowntrueself ( 607117 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @03:41PM (#10727124)
    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.

    ;)

  • Question (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 04, 2004 @03:43PM (#10727143)
    From the article:

    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by theMerovingian ( 722983 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @03:43PM (#10727145) Journal

    make your own [216.239.39.104]

    google cache, since we would deestroy geocities

  • modifications needed for commercial viability (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.

  • How did the OTHER entries work? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by VE3ECM ( 818278 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @03:51PM (#10727242)
    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?

  • Painting the walls? (Score:5, Funny)

    by se2schul ( 667721 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @03:53PM (#10727266)
    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!!

  • Article text (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 04, 2004 @03:54PM (#10727279)
    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.

  • Competition was fixed (Score:5, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @04:08PM (#10727434)
    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.

  • It found.... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...Sarah Connor?

  • Wow... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Xentax ( 201517 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @04:14PM (#10727486)
    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

  • OFFICIAL PAGES (Score:5, Informative)

    by MTO_B. ( 814477 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @04:32PM (#10727685) Homepage
    The mentioned contest is CLAWAR 2004 - MADRID [iai.csic.es]. (See hundreds of pictures if you wish).

    It's part of CLAWAR [clawar.net] Climbing and Walking Robots. As you can see, the mentioned robot had a very different design from the usual spider-like design.

  • Cheaters never prosper (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @04:33PM (#10727700) Journal
    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.
  • 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 [duke.edu]. It includes a link to a hi-res version of the robot pic and a somewhat different blurb.

    Here [duke.edu] it says:

    Good news too from the Duke Robotics Club. Thanks to funding from the Lord Foundation, the club's newest robot,

    a commercially-available wall-climber, took first place in the 2004 CLAWAR (CLimbing And WAlking Robot) International Wall-Climbing Robot Competition last week in Madrid. Pratt seniors Andrew Meyerson and Kevin Parker and Pratt junior Julien Finlay helped prepare the robot for the competitio

    • Further reading reveals that the students (from Duke and North Carolina State Univ) adapted the commercial robot by adding sensors and code to allow autonomous operation. The commercial edition [vortexhc.com] relies on an operator with an remote controller.

      Being that it's a Duke newsletter, they obscured the part where the team lead went to NC State. Also, though now on the faculty at Duke, the team's advisor got his PhD in EE (robotics) from NC State (1998?).
      • Hmmm, at Vortex HC LLC of Morrisville NC, the "commercial source" of the wall climbing robot, I find that the only human listed as a contact [vortexhc.com] is " Office Manager : Jason Janet, PhD.", who just happens to appear in the Duke News release above as:

        Jason Janet, an adjunct professor in Duke's electrical and computer engineering department and faculty advisor on the robotics project.

        And if you check out Duke faculty web pages, you find that Janet is not just an "adjunct professor", he is an adjunct assistant prof [duke.edu]

    • Thanks for the tip. Now I can address a tangent on something mentioned further up:

      Not sure where the author of the original article shops for groceries, but
      He.
      has.
      one.
      BIGASS.
      can of tuna.

  • Those killer robots from the movie Runaway [imdb.com]

  • I had this professor at Duke (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "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. "

    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 decen

  • More photos here (Score:4, Informative)

    by word munger ( 550251 ) <dsmunger@@@gmail...com> on Thursday November 04, 2004 @06:14PM (#10728958) Homepage Journal
    Duke's Web site has more pictures and a longer article [duke.edu]
  • Someone at Duke reads Judge Dredd comics.

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