Want to climb the walls? You could be doing it just like Batman, thanks to a 23-year-old MIT grad student. According to mlive.com, Nate Ball has won a Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for his invention, the Powered Rope Ascender. The wall climber can propel a person up a building at about a storey a second.Using high-density, lithium-ion batteries, the device, including its harness, weighs 20 pounds (that's about nine kilograms, for those of us who think metric) and can propel a person up an anchored rope at 10 feet (roughly three metres) per second, Ball said. It also can be used to climb down.
The device wraps rope in much the same way that a ship raises or lowers its anchor, using a capstan and tightly wound rope. Specially configured rollers and a spindle continuously pull rope through the device. A tighter grip is produced each time the rope is wrapped around a cylinder and more weight is applied to the line.
Ball says he'll invest his $30,000 prize money in a company to produce his invention.
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