First Place: Stair Climbing Robot
The Dean of our IT department approached me with a project. The project was to turn the design of a robot into an actual robot that would climb stairs. I built the original design, only to confirm my suspicion that it would never climb stairs. I took as many of the parts from the original as I could and designed a second model. This model was far superior and had much better chances of climbing stairs.
The second model was made from carbon fiber and formed with a vacuum bagging process. Everything else was made out of ABS plastic using a Dimension 3D Printer (even the wheels). This saved a lot of weight over the original aluminum model. I eventually built and tested the entire model and it now has the ability to climb stairs.
