Naminukas Is a Pneumatic Walking, Driving and Wall-Climbing Robot

Mykolas Juraitis has designed a portable robot that can navigate inside a building using vacuum suction grippers.

Jeremy Cook
4 years agoRobotics

It can be hard for small robots to climb stairs, much less reach places like windowsills. Flying is one option, but restricts payload, and this type of bot can be unsafe to operate indoors. Mykolas Juraitis' solution is a pneumatic robot named "Naminukas," which can move along hard surfaces like floors and ceilings as well as scale walls using a pair of vacuum suction grippers.

The robot alternates gripping with each suction cup, while the body and the other gripper rotates in the direction of travel. There's no vacuum sensor per se, but instead uses the onboard BeagleBone Blue's IMU to detect whether the robot is tilted correctly, thus inferring a good grip.

If that wasn't interesting enough, the two suction cup grippers can also rotate at 90 degrees, turning them into rotating wheels. The robot then functions as a balance bot, which allows it to traverse rough surfaces that wouldn't normally be able to produce a good vacuum.

The robot is meant to be portable: under 30cm in any dimension and around 1.5Kg in weight so it can be packed in carry-on luggage. Although still something of a prototype, it currently comes in at just over 1.4Kg, so this goal should be attainable when finished.

Jeremy Cook
Engineer, maker of random contraptions, love learning about tech. Write for various publications, including Hackster!
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