Chennai :
The life of a window cleaner hangs on a rope, but the invention of a group of Anna University students may just make it safer.
H Ramkumar, along with his three team members from the production technology department of the university’s MIT campus, has created a semi-manned robot that can climb glass walls, cling onto them and give them a wipe.
“We wanted to bring out something that would be lively and stand out from monotonous models,” said Ramkumar on the robot that was designed as part of the students’ BE final year project. “We also need a safe and efficient cleaning system because, conventionally, a human worker has to hang several feet above the ground with an unreliable safety system. Sometimes it proves fatal.”
Though it is in its skeletal form now, the 2.1kg robot is ready with its functions. The remote has four buttons to control the robot’s movement, done with the help of suction cups that take turns to climb glass walls. The light and rectangular vehicle has two wheels in the middle and four suction cups at the corners. While two cups help in climbing, the other two help the machine hold onto the wall.
On one corner of the device is a rolling wiper with a compartment above that to keep a water bottle. Near that is a tube through which water is sprayed continuously and the wiper cleans the wall, moving up or down simultaneously. A sponge wiper at the other corner and two flat ones in the middle do the finishing job. The dirty water is collected by a rolling wiper.
The students don’t claim it is the first of its kind. “We were inspired by some models in other countries,” said Ramkumar. “They use high-end technology for skyscrapers but we’ve used simple methods so far. But, our innovation would be an image processing camera,” said Ramkumar. The sensor in the built-in camera would show obstacles in the path or in any particular area to be cleared so that the machine can be moved accordingly. “The video can be continuously observed on a screen,” he said.
“Finalising the design was the toughest part,” said Ramkumar’s teammate S R Sadhve. “We had to stay back till late in the evening during the designing stage. Building the device was easier because we got most of the equipment from our college laboratory.” There are many such robots in other countries, but these are not available in the Indian market. “We would like to take this project forward and improvise it,” said Sadhve.
The duo, along with Sahil Bharti and S Ishwarya Lakshmi, got the ‘excellent paper’ award at the International Conference on Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering (ICCSME) and their paper was also published in the journal of South Asian Research Centre ( SARC).
source: http://www.articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Chennai> Mechanical Engineering / by Saradha Mohan Kumar, TNN / August 02nd, 2013