It takes about six minutes for a firefighter with a full load of gear to reach the top of a 30-story building by running up the stairs–and when he gets there, he’s tired. A group of MIT students have designed a rope-climbing device that can carry 250 pounds at a top speed of 10 feet per second. They have a contract to make the climbing device for the U.S. Army for use in urban combat zones, and they hope to make it available to rescue workers.
The students founded a company, Atlas Devices, based in Cambridge, MA, to commercialize the device, which is about the size of a power drill. Nathan Ball, Atlas’s chief technology officer, says that such a device has never been made before because the batteries and motors needed to generate enough power for rapid rope ascents have been bulky and heavy. Atlas’s 20-pound machine uses a fast-charging, high-power-density lithium-ion battery made by A123 Systems, based in Watertown, MA. (See “More Powerful Batteries.”) To use the device, a soldier or rescue worker wraps a rope around its cylinder and clips it to a harness worn around the waist.
Ball says the biggest design challenge in making the climber was a mechanical one. “We had to come up with a clever mechanism to grip the rope securely while not damaging it,” he says. The device relies on the capstan effect: the more times a rope is wrapped around a cylinder, the stronger the device’s grip on the rope. To take advantage of the effect, the MIT students had to make a device that could tightly grip a few turns of a rope while still rapidly advancing it.
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