Students in Switzerland build a wheelchair that climbs stairs | Hacker News Reader

Students in Switzerland build a wheelchair that climbs stairs

venturebeat.com

56 pointsserengeti18 comments

The inventor of the Segway first invented a far superior stair-climbing wheelchair, the iBOT, way back in 2003, but it was regulated out of existence.

http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/02/11/ibot-discontinued-unfo...

However, the FDA recently reclassified it so it may be put back into production within a couple of years.

http://www.fda.gov/downloads/AdvisoryCommittees/CommitteesMe...

Hmm, that's interesting. Comparing the two sets of images, the Segway one certainly looks far less safe that it actually is, I wonder if it fell victim to that gut reaction.

My mother is wheelchair bound. A stair climbing powered wheelchair would be useful to get over 1-2 small steps at restaurants. She would never in a million years use it for the use case in the video. Most people don't realize how scary it is even to go up and down steep wheelchair ramps in a power chair (especially for elderly). Going up, as shown in the video, is one thing - going down is probably terrifying. For instance, to account for a steep decline, you have to tilt the seat back at an extreme angle. You can no longer see where you're going! It is probably most similar to going up the lift hill on a roller coaster where you're tilted back looking up at the sky.... except you're going down in a direction you cannot see, you're in full control and you can easily screw up at any moment if you get nervous and panic. It's not something the person in the chair can easily do on their own.

In the USA, there's a large influx of amputees because of the recent wars. I can imagine most of those younger men and women can handle climbing stairs in this thing, but at the same time most of them are fit enough to wear prosthetics and can probably just walk up.

So it is a problem, but I think the solution has to involve making the person in the chair feel 100% safe and comfortable.

This is similar to riding a Tibetan horse in the mountains. Going up is well enough, but going down...wow, pretty scary and I would imagine any legged vehicle would be similar.

Good thought. I work with people who are quite often wheelchair bound and with many of them the fear of falling is very apparent and obviously logical.

I wonder how well this would work on carpeted stairs? Since the treads are gripping only the 'nose' of the stair is there the possibility of slippage on the pile? What if the padding gave way or the treads pulled the carpet away from the stair?

How well would this chair recover from scenarios like this? Or in any failure for that matter.

It certainly looks like it has a lot of promise!

It probably won't be a problem because people sometimes walk like that one stairs too (at least I do!). For walking the loads would be higher because they're concentrated on one foot on one edge of one step. The failure mode of the carpet pulling away is interesting though! A walking person might just fall onto the next step while this wheelchair looks like it could keep popping the carpet out step by step as it falls all the way down.

Was anyone paying attention when the Dean Kamen wheelchair stopped being made? Was it cost/demand, didn't work? The wikipedia article says something about the FDA reclassifying it but that doesn't seem to explain why it stopped being made.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBOT

It sounds like the market was too small:

http://forums.segwaychat.org/archive/index.php/t-20984.html

I looked at the iBOT page in the Wayback Machine, it jumps from a sales page to a page with a statement they aren't selling it anymore.

I always wondered about that - it seemed like a great invention.

IIRC once the FDA reclassified it it was no longer classified as a "wheelchair" so it wasn't covered by insurance / HMO's which with it's cost pretty much meant it would not be bought by anyone.

As mentioned in one on the comments on the article, a patent for something very similar was filed with 1988 priority in the US: https://www.google.com/patents/US5123495

Wonder why it hasn't made to the market in the 27 years since that patent?

Affordable robots 27 years ago were fairly primitive. Even expensive robots were pretty limited compared to what we have today.

I live in Australia, here stair climbing wheelchairs are obviated by wheelchair ramps in to every public use building and commercial building. Wheelchair bound people are also given subsidies to have ramps installed at their homes too.

Additionally, I'd hazard a guess that price effects consumer uptake. If the the stair climbing feature costs, probably at least(?), $5,000 to $10,000 dollars extra fewer people are likely interest.

edit: a word and a space

That video is really melodramatic. It's a guy slowly ascending a staircase with these crazy dynamic shots and music that would be more appropriate for a compilation of airshow maneuvers. That said, it doesn't look technologically like it's all that interesting unless they've managed to make it super-cheap.

If it's at all affordable for people who are confined to wheelchairs, a working stair-climbing wheelchair would be a life-changer for tens or hundreds of millions of people. Airshow maneuvers, by comparison, are pretty, but also pretty unimportant.

Reminds me of these Japanese stair-climbing hand-trucks that you see delivery people using to get supplies into the shops in the subway stations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCEglW9e5EQ

This probably weighs 12 tonnes.

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