This semester's ME 370 design challenge carried on the tradition of designing an inverted walker that could traverse across a rope - this time suspended above the first floor of MEL.
Written by Photos and video by Rachel Berry
This semester, students in ME 370 (Mechanical Design I) were tasked with creating an inverted walker that would hang suspended from a rope and walk across it. They presented their final designs on the second floor of the Mechanical Engineering Lab, traversing ropes tied between railings overlooking the first floor.
Course instructors, Professor Elizabeth Hsiao-Wecksler and Teaching Assistant Professor Kevin Wandke, provided the teams with a motor and batteries as well as a few design constraints – allowing students to harness their creativity to generate solutions based on the factors they thought were most important.
The guidelines the students were given included:
The walker must move at least 2 meters per minute, with extra credit for going faster
The walker cannot damage the rope as it moves
The walker cannot use wheels to move forward
The walker needs to fit within a shoebox sized volume
The walker needs to have a fun or entertaining theme
With these constraints, students developed a wide variety of approaches to solve the mechanical design challenge.
Throughout the semester the students presented their design ideas and performance calculations to their peers, TAs and instructors to receive feedback and ideas for improvement.