Adrenalin junkies, step aside: a new base-jumping robot can climb up buildings before deploying a paraglider to fly back down to earth. It is also equipped with an on-board video camera to film the jump.

The robot – named Paraswift – is a collaboration between Disney Research and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, and was initially built for entertainment purposes. But as the first compact robot that can both climb and fly, it has practical uses too, such as gathering aerial footage for 3D modelling systems.

The remote-controlled robot uses a rotor spinning in a tube – known as an impeller – to create a vortex that lets it stick to the wall as it climbs. “It’s like a mini tornado within the robot,” says ETH student Lukas Geissmann, who presented Paraswift yesterday at the Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots and the Support Technologies for Mobile Machines in Paris, France, in collaboration with Paul Beardsley of Disney Research. The centre of this vortex is low pressure, just like the centre of a tornado, and the pressure gradient glues the robot to the wall.

“The big benefit of this is that you don’t need to have a seal between the physical robot and the wall because the vortex forms its own seal round the low-pressure area,” Beardsley says. That means only the robot’s wheels need touch the wall, and Paraswift can navigate the often rough surfaces of ordinary walls.


This is one of the major challenges in designing wall-climbing robots, says Metin Sitti of the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: “It is very difficult to have a robust attachment mechanism that could work on a wide range of smooth and slightly rough surfaces in real-world conditions.”

No fear of heights

Mobile robots are increasingly used to inspect dangerous or hard-to-reach structures such as wind turbines, dams and tall buildings. Most commonly, they use magnetic adhesion, but that limits a robot to metal structures. Others use suction or grips, but often come unstuck on rough surfaces.

The transition from climbing to flight also posed a design challenge. Currently, the paraglider – parachute material attached to struts – is deployed under remote control by a novel mechanical arm made of carbon fibre. Once the paraglider is open, the vortex is switched off and the robot simply falls off the wall and into flight. The team is now interested in automating the deployment so the paraglider could deploy automatically should the robot fall accidentally.

In the meantime, base-jumping robots like this one could be useful in creating 3D models of the environment. “For example, with Google Street View, at street level trees and pedestrians could obscure the view,” says Beardsley. Robots could climb up buildings, scan around for aerial views and deliver the data for 3D modelling.