Climbing robots take on dangers of high-elevation work
International Climbing Machines (ICM) has its headquarters in a
shabby warehouse on the outskirts of Ithaca. The workshop is
hardly bigger than a three-car garage. Metal shelves filled with
spare parts line the walls, and in one corner there’s enough
space for company president Sam Maggio to show off his device.
It’s called a climber. “We simply put a vacuum motor, a standard
industrial vacuum motor, on the body of the climber and that
establishes a vacuum in the chamber that’s in the center of the
climber,” says Maggio. That vacuum keeps the 25-pound robot
stuck to the wall while it climbs, just like Spiderman. But the
robot doesn’t look like Spiderman. It looks like a sump pump
with a two-foot long metal body and rubber tracks on either
side. Workers operate it with a Playstation controller. "There
just needed to be a better way" The climber has two classic
characteristics of a successful invention: It’s so simple that
it makes you wonder why no one els