14 DAY TRIAL // Dan Granett, an engineer living in the city of Berkeley in California, US, is quite convinced that the world of entertainment could use an extreme makeover, and that the creation of Transformers-like ginormous robots is the best thing that could ever happen to it.
Hence, this engineer is now looking into the possibility to piece together a robot measuring about 70 feet (approximately 21.3 meters) in height, and whose design would allow it to throw cars up in the air and catch them before they hit the ground.
Simply put, Dan Granett wants to build an oversized robot able to juggle cars. The engineer is so committed to this project that, even though it will probably be a while before the robot is introduced to the world, he has already settled on a name for it: the BugJuggler.
“BugJuggler is a 70ft tall robot that uses hydraulic cylinders to hurl cars into the sky and catch them in mid-air. BugJuggler will use a diesel engine to generate hydraulic pressure,” he writes in a description on the official website for this project.
Furthermore, “An operator located in the robot’s head will be able to control its motions using a haptic feedback interface connected to high-speed servo valves. Hydraulic accumulators will allow for the rapid movement required for the robot to juggle cars or other large, heavy objects.”
Dan Granett expects that, when completed, his 70-foot-tall robot will prove strong and coordinated enough to be able to juggle as many as three cars at a time. Check out the video below to get a better idea of how the engineer hopes that his robot will behave when introduced to three defenseless vehicles.
Not at all surprisingly, it looks like completing one such wacky engineering project comes with a rather impressive price tag. Thus, Dan Grannet is currently bending over backwards hoping to come up with the money he needs in order to build not the actual robot, but a human-scale prototype of it.
In a nutshell, it was just a few days ago that the engineer launched a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter. The campaign has until now secured a little over $570 (about €424), and aims to raise an impressive $50,000 (roughly €37,250) by September 12, 2014, at the latest.
Dan Grannet maintains that the first and the most important step towards making the BugJuggler become a reality is securing the funds needed to build this prototype. If created, this prototype will employ the same mechanism and technologies as the proposed BugJuggler does, and will be able to throw objects weighing as much as 250 pounds (114 kilograms).
“The BugJuggler prototype is the first step toward the ultimate goal of constructing the full size BugJuggler robot. We will use the prototype to refine the mechanical design of the big bot. The interface developed for the prototype will be the basis for the interface of the 70ft tall robot,” engineering enthusiast Dan Grannet writes on Kickstarter.
