Student's climbing device could make Batman jealous

BOSTON — A 23-year-old inventor has come up with a tool to give mere mortals the powers of a superhero: the ability to zoom up a rope as fast as 10 feet per second and scale the side of a building.

The battery-powered, handheld gadget is envisioned as a tool for firefighters and soldiers, and helped earn Nate Ball of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, announced Wednesday.

While he has practical applications in mind, Ball says it isn't a stretch to compare the tool to the gadgets that fictional heroes use to quickly climb to dizzying heights.

"It's neat to be able to create a real-life engineering solution that has the actual functionality described in the fantastic situations you see on Batman, and with James Bond," said Ball, an MIT graduate student who spends his spare time rock-climbing and pole-vaulting.

The invention grew out of an MIT-sponsored, Army-funded student design competition in 2004 to develop technology to help soldiers ascend rapidly.

Ball collaborated with three fellow MIT students to refine the design from the competition and create the Powered Rope Ascender, a product of the startup company they founded, Atlas Devices.

Using high-density, lithium-ion batteries, the device, including its harness, weighs 20 pounds and can propel a person up an anchored rope at 10 feet 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.

The user would pull a trigger to control the rate of ascent or descent.

"The challenge is making a mechanism that can continuously pull the rope up reliably with an easy way to clip it in, and without having it chew up the rope," said Ball, a mechanical-engineering student from Newport, Ore.

Last week, Atlas Devices won its first contract, a $120,000 award from the Army to provide several prototypes. Ball also will receive $30,000 in prize money as part of the award.

The tool has potential applications for soldiers, firefighters, police and others to make rescues or complete other missions on high-rise buildings or in canyons, said Lisa Shaler-Clark, an Army Research Office technology transfer specialist.