Disney Unveils Super Cool Wall-Climbing 'Gravity Defying' Robot

Disney Research Zurich and ETH have collaborated to design a super cool, gravity defying robot. This remote-controlled machine has the ability to drive around on the ground and then transition fairly seamlessly to moving vertically along walls with the help of some very cool engineering.

The Robot is aptly named VertiGo, and has one very unusual feature that allows it to travel in a second dimension usually reserved only for flying vehicles. With the help of two drone propellers built into the body of the machine, it can provide enough thrust to keep itself glued to the wall as it drives around seemingly defying the laws of gravity. As the machine approaches a vertical surface, it slowly drives its front wheels up the wall, and as its orientation changes, the angle of the propellers also change to compensate for the weight of the vehicle. It can then drive around on the wall as though it were still safely on the ground since the propellers provide enough thrust to keep the wheels securely stuck to the wall.

To facilitate this kind of unusual locomotion, the machine has to be extremely lightweight and so the designers had to come up with some very cool engineering to allow it maintain its orientation without smashing to the ground. The main chassis is constructed using carbon fiber with a very cool honeycomb design to increase the strength and durability of the vehicle. Many of the parts have also been 3D printed to save weight and maximize strength. The designers even went as far as using mostly plastic screws to assemble the machine in order to save every ounce of extra weight.

It’s hard to say what the designer’s intentions for the main use case of this robot will be, but the technology is very cool regardless. With the rising popularity and usefulness of drones being increasingly apparent these days, it’s easy to see from this machine how the techniques that allow those aforementioned flying machines to be so stable and agile in flight, can be taken and implemented in new and original ways to other methods of travel. The scalability of this design is questionable however, because as the size of the robot increases, the propellers have to move more and more air to maintain its orientation, and as you can see by the magically floating mattress in the video, it already has to push a lot of air.

Window washing seems to be the only thing that immediately comes to mind as far as usefulness of this technology, but even then, considering how lightweight it needs to be to maintain its wall-crawling orientation, high winds could be a serious problem while driving up the side of a massively tall skyscraper. As lightweight as it is, we still think it could do some damage falling from such a height.

All joking aside though, this technology could have some very innovative way to deal with emergency situations such as fire and bomb threats. Its incredible mobility could be used to scout out locations and situations where humans would have a very hard time determining the best way to proceed.