MIT students invent wall crawling device

The last few years have seen a number of fraternity house fires caused by the failure to install proper fire sprinklers. It is perhaps just, then, that one of the most interesting fire rescue devices this year was invented by a team of college students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their Atlas Powered Rope Ascender can pull a firefighter carrying one hundred pounds of equipment up a thirty-story building in thirty seconds — far better than the eight minutes required to climb the stairs. “It is literally like what Batman or James Bond has,” said graduate student Nathan Ball. “It is a cordless power tool that you hook onto your safety harness. It has variable speed control just like a drill.”

How it works: First responders on the scene attach a rope to the roof of the burning building while those on the ground weave it through a series of rollers atop a turning spindle. As the battery-powered spindle rotates, it pulls the rope through the device and hoists the person — a perfect example of the capstan effect, inwhich a rope grips tighter each time it wraps around a cylinder. The tighter the grip, the more weight that the system can handle. The Atlas also has a system that prevents the rope from overlapping or winding up on itself on the internal cylinder, thereby ensuring continuous movement.

For his efforts, Ball received the university’s $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize (which, we are intrigued to learn, was once won by James McLurkin, who invented the PackBot Tactical Mobile Robot, now manufactured by iRobot.) Perhaps taking a lesson from McLurkin, Ball and his fellow students have formed a company called Atlas Devices to commercialize the device and have already contracted to sell them to the U.S. Army. The future commercial cost is estimated at $1,000 per unit.

-read more in Michael Kanellos CNET report