Vertical Climb

Published on 2015-09-25 in Tote.

A small robot walking around your desk or even around your room on the floor is one thing. The same robot climbing your furniture and able to get everywhere in your room is a completely different game! That’s why I always wanted to make Tote able to climb. Unfortunately, the problem is harder than it seems at first sight.

One way of doing it is by using magnets on the feet. It limits you to metal surfaces, but that’s a start. Today the magnets I ordered for that purpose finally arrived, so I was able to do some experiments. Unfortunately, the results are not very encouraging.

First, I attached the magnets to the robot. I figured that I want to maximize the traction, while minimizing the force needed to actually un-stick the leg, so I went for small flat magnets, and I wrapped them into rubber from a balloon, then tied that to each leg.

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Since the magnets seemed to be small and weak, I used two of them on every foot initially. The effect wasn’t very good – they turned out to be too strong, and Tote couldn’t lift any of its feet:

Fine, let’s try with fewer magnets then. That turned out to be just strong enough to hold the robot when all four feet are touching the metal surface, but not strong enough when on of the feet is raised:

Oh well, nobody said it will be easy. Back to the drawing board now. Maybe I will try to climb a net next time?