Posted on 12/30/2015 10:44:47 PM PST by TigerLikesRooster
Disney's VertiGo Combines Car, Helicopter to Drive Up Walls
By Evan Ackerman
Posted 29 Dec 2015
For robots, multimodal is the way to go, when going involves getting to as many places as you possibly can. Designing a robot with the ability to deal with a variety of terrains or conditions usually requires some creativity, and in the past, some of the most creative designs have come from ETH Zurich and Disney Research, like this wall-climbing base-jumping tornado-powered robot called Paraswift.
As cool as Paraswift was, since it depended on suction to climb walls, it couldn't deal with rough surfaces that prevented a solid vacuum seal. This led the Disney Research/ETH team to try something else, and that something else is a new robot called VertiGo, which is a sort of hybrid helicopter-car-thing that can drive on the ground and then transition to climb up vertical walls.
/snip
Those four wheels are unpowered: all of VertiGo's propulsive power comes from those two steerable propellers, which can direct thrust along both pitch and roll axes. It's no slouch in car mode, but the neatest trick is of course the ground to wall transition, which the robot accomplishes by using its rear propellor to thrust against the wall while the front propellor thrusts upward, causing the robot to flip vertically. This particular control problem was "somewhat of a step in the dark," Disney Research's Paul Beardsley told us. "But it worked."
The advantage that VertiGo has over climbing robots that rely on adhesion is that VertiGo is actively pushing itself onto the wall, which means that it doesn't care all that much about the characteristics of the wall itself. It'll work on smooth surfaces like glass, masonry like brick, rough surfaces like trees, and even surfaces that are curved.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectrum.ieee.org ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e9P9_QM8cN8
Strange they would chose Vertigo as the name; The word, as used in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, means ‘spun around and dizzy’.
What if you made the wheels into rotor blade guards and make it a both land and air vehicle?
So it could fly and do what it does as well, maybe use six wheels and you can use any two or three to provide the pushing force as needed.
A lot of people are already driven up the wall.
My wife told me I was driving her crazy. I told her it was a short drive. I can't understand why she threw that knife at me.
LoL!
A short drive up the wall.
Love it!
“Strange they would chose Vertigo as the name; The word, as used in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, means ‘spun around and dizzy’.”
I experienced vertigo once. Wild thing...
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