Designing a climbing mechanism for 2013... a humbling experience

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by danopia

For those of you that have ideas for a 30-point climb, would your robot be able to scale to a pyramid of, say, 10 levels without nontrivial changes? Ignore your robot hanging 30 feet in the air.

It seems like some postings I've seen would because it's repetitive, and others have like a full dance routine going on that lands perfectly on top and wouldn't work for any other pyramid.

Our design is a basic extension of what we did in 2010 - same basic concept, but double the level of complexity to get to the third level. In fact, the level of complexity to go from 2 to 3 is actually less than that required to go from 1 to 2 with this design!

As for adding levels... the changes wouldn't be non-trivial, but they would be direct and obvious. Of course, to go 10 levels we would need a much bigger frame perimeter There's an alternate concept that branched off from this one that would allow us to tackle any number of levels successfully - basically the same design with a few added tweaks that amount to a lot of control complexity. But limiting to 3 levels proved much easier in the design.