[Winboni]
This video showcases Winboni, a tiny, square robot that attaches itself to the window with a suction fan and moves across the window with wheels, while cleaning it with felt pads. It was the brainchild of four MSU mechanical engineering students whose product took first place at the International Student Design Competition of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Nov. 2 in Boston.
[Video starts with a humming and buzzing noise of Winboni, as it moves about a window, demonstrating how it works.]
[MSU students took first place in the International Student Design Competition of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It took four students five tries and 900 hours to meet contest specifications. MSU is the first school to repeat winning the award.]
Emily Duszynski, engineering student: [Close-up of the robot, showing all the wires, screws and intricate design of Winboni] The goal of the project was to create a robot that would autonomously, meaning move around the window itself, without being controlled, clean the window, [someone places the robot on a window to show how it works] hopefully top and bottom of the window pane [hands come into the screen and are adjusting some of the wiring on Winboni as it sits on the table]. However, sometimes when you optimize the system, all the constraints aren't necessarily the most important, [again, Winbow is moving along on a window] so a team choice for us was to just clean the bottom window because we could do it faster and we could clean more things off the window and get more points that way.
It works with a centrifical fan out of a Dirt Devil dust buster, actually, that vacuums it to the window and it moves around with servos that are underneath of it, like a little chassis, like a car. Those servos are controlled with an accelerometer that tells it what angle it is on the window so that it knows where to go and what direction to go, and when. And it's programmed with censors that around the edge, so basically it knows where it is on the window.
Kyle Koepf, engineering student: I spent a lot of time, a lot of late nights here in this lab [zoom-out of Koepf and two of the engineers looking on at Winboni which sits on a table, along with pliers, batteries, tape and other tools to make sure the robot works] with the other group members, doing a lot of research and development and a lot of testing. Overall, it was a really good experience and I think everything paid off.
[Edited by Kristi Jourdan. Special thanks to Emily Duszynski, Kyle Koepf, Jonathan Luckhardt, Joshua Thomet]