Robots are being used to replace people in dangerous jobs all the time, and the SkySweeper is one that looks to help by climbing across just about anything rope-shaped in order to help people out.
The cost of robotics today makes it so they are only deployed in the most dangerous of situations. In the case of power line crawlers — robots designed to help determine the safety and health of any given power line — they are far too expensive to hand out to every single person on the job. The same goes for using a similar robot to check out a rope bridge flung across a dangerous mountainside or an old, potentially unsafe zipline. We have the tools, but they are so expensive that most people don’t or can’t use them. SkySweeper is looking to dramatically lower the cost of these kinds of robots by rethinking how they move across power lines and ropes.
Nick Morozovsky, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at University of California, San Diego has assembled a power line crawler that works like an inchworm crawling across the line. The motor that controls the bot is at the center of the design, which flexes like an elbow to push the robot along as actuator clamps grip the rope. The push or pull motion is designed to be controlled remotely, so the robot can scoot in either direction as it moves.
This early prototype demonstrates a better design for these kinds of machines, and offers a lot of room for customization to suit the needs of the task at hand. Power line crawling, for example, would need custom sensors to help test the lines and make sure they are functioning correctly. In the video, Nick discusses the flexible design and how it would be possible to deploy variations of his SkySweeper in dozens of different use cases, due mostly to the design and the significantly lower cost to implement.
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