This reminds me of levitating fluids over air by vibration, which Steve Mould made a nice video about: The Levitating Liquid Pendlum - https://youtu.be/gMAKamGIiMc
Thank you for this link. That was incredibly interesting. I won't spoil the twist at the end, suffice to say that I now am hoping for something like that in a scifi movie.
When you want to hear what it might sound like but instead they play loud music over the video. Quite frustrating. Is it going to become a ceiling roomba or not based on how loud it is?
> There are a couple of downsides too, though. The biggest one could be that 200 Hz is a frequency that’s well within human hearing, which probably explains that soundtrack in the video—the robot is, as the researchers put it, “inherently quite noisy.”
200Hz seems a low enough frequency (1.7m wavelength) that they could do active noise cancellation with a small onboard speaker designed to generate a similar sound 180 deg out of phase such that it cancels in far field. Would probably need some DSP to generate anti harmonics as well assuming there are some nonlinearities.
For cleaning windows you can also employ a Robot to do the job. Though i think a safety cable is a really good idea, not sure how that is done for a Robot working on the ceiling.
I've certainly seen ceilings, such as at restaurants, that are out of reach of cleaning so they are covered with visible nastiness. I also once lived in a rental with a really high ceiling that was impossible to clean the cob webs, which were quite visible. Having robots that can crawl up there and clean -- or for that matter, paint -- would be handy.
However, that shows there is demand for paint on high ceilings. A robotic arm, with an AI that is able to paint the corners and circumvolutions with a brush, that is able to retouch if a spot was missed?
Maybe in the future, luxury will be in high ceilings that are clean and renovated. Imagine how dusty the paintings are in churches and palaces - imagine we could brush off the dust and restore their intensity every 6 months.
Large glass facades need cleaning at least once a year. The problem is to reach the heights. Currently there are a few solutions to this problem: hydraulic lifting platforms, industrial climbers and climbing solutions where you don’t need to be a real industrial climber. Robots would probably be cheaper.
There already are also "ceiling roombas" holding up by sucking[0].
(I don't know whether they can actually do ceilings or only vertical surfaces for now, but it seems if you could build the latter product you would also be able to make the former)
My apartment is not conductive to robot vacuums, but would entertain the idea of employing a bunch of robot window cleaners. Seems like a very well defined problem at first glance.
I could have sworn I've seen something like this before on YouTube already. Someone demonstrated a similar effect, and attached different-sized weights to test the adhesion. For the life of me, I can't find it.
I distinctly remember it too. This wasn't a robot, but just a speaker system without propulsion. I think it was demonstrated on a plexiglass sheet, probably above and below it.
They demonstrated various frequencies and weights. Maybe various designs with multiple speakers too?
IIRC, the author mentioned they patented it, but couldn't go anywhere with it.
Unfortunately, I can't find it anymore. I'll keep looking a bit and edit or post below if I do.
While I find this effect to be really surprising, it's also somehow intuitive to me. I think it reminds me of holding a piece of grass between my thumbs and blowing to make it vibrate. Different, sort of reversed physics, but somewhat related. What really surprises me about this effect is how much weight it can support.
Wait until these are integrated into wearbles - gloves, shoes, a back-pad etc..
Also - overhead delivery pathways. Can you get more load capacity with one large disc or many small discs?
If the bot can follow a magnetic tape along a path this could be a delivery mecanism in facilities of the future.
Whate would be interesting is if there were a low-voltage track that it ran a connection to for power - or an inverter coil on the top side of the delivery track to provide constant wireless power to the 'suctioned' devices crawling along its path.
This thing could revolutionize a lot of deliver mechanisms -
Put them along hospital corridors within a tube/enclosure such that delivery bots can peddle about the hospital unheeded and without impeding existing traffic....
Edit: Y'all don't know about the Space Elevator ? There was a competition to figure out how to get a thing to climb a really long rope to space... This looks like it could do it
Single-crystal graphene is the leading candidate material.
I guess we just need a continuous graphene-making builder robot.
If it were me, I would arrange a dozen or so ribbons in a circular configuration for redundancy with a platform climber made mostly from carbon fiber and covered in multilayer insulation.
The paper that is the source of the footage in the video: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.04777