INVENTION - Making life easier for the disabled: this is the project in which a number of Swiss students have started a year ago. The fruit of their incredible work is an armchair that allows the disabled to climb steps. A considerable advance that could change their lives.
Whether at home, in the city or at work, people with mobility difficulties face sometimes unimaginable difficulties to circulate. Structures are not always designed for them, and they rarely find ramps to help them climb the stairs. Today, the remarkable invention of a dozen students from the Polytechnic School of Zurich brings them new expectations.
Autonomy
The student project, which began in the summer of 2014, presents a way to improve the lives of millions of people. It is a wheelchair built thanks to an electric propulsion system. His little name? Scalevo. In addition to its two main wheels, it also has a small rubber track.
When faced with a staircase, the machine automatically detects the presence of an obstacle. Two small wheels then unfurl, while the snowcat is activated automatically to climb the steps. A built-in gyro maintains the user's balance, which remains in a horizontal position at all times, regardless of seat tilt.
Uncertain marketing
Before considering the idea of making life easier for the disabled, one of the group's students initially had the intention of setting up a robot with the same capabilities. It was only after a discussion with one of his teachers that Beni Winter decided that he would "refine his idea" in order to "make it more useful to society", reports the Radio Monaco website.
However, this revolutionary device has a negative aspect: its slowness, as evidenced by the video demonstration at the top of the article. On their site, its designers assure that they are still trying to correct this defect. "The goal is to achieve a speed of one step per second, the maximum that allows our current hardware configuration," they explain. Another imperfection: if we can climb the stairs with this device, we do not know yet if it is possible to go down ... Which can quickly be annoying.
But Scalevo at least has the merit of enjoying full autonomy, unlike previous similar prototypes such as iBot, which necessarily requires the support of a person or a railing:
For the moment, Beni Winter and his comrades have not given any information about a possible future date of commercialization.