New device allows users to scale walls, mountain faces

Air National Guard Unit in Louisville and from Air Force Special Operations Command (Hurlburt Field) on their process and final design. They were quizzed and congratulated, then grilled by the pararescue jumpers who were charged with physically testing the teams’ systems on the 90-foot high, sheer concrete face of an abandoned cement silo.

The Utah State University team was the only team to get all four military personnel to the top of the 90-foot wall.

“The logistics of this project became real very quick,” said team member Dan Aguirre. “Someone was actually relying on our design to climb a wall. You can’t get that in a textbook.”

Alok Das, AFRL senior design scientist for design innovation, agrees. “AFRL gets the benefit of some very creative ideas that address a real military need, while the students get an opportunity to work under real-world conditions,” he said. “They gain experience in rapid prototyping and engineering a solution to a customer need, knowing that their design could truly make a difference.”

Byard Wood, USU’s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department head, liked the competition because it was a fresh project and there wasn’t a heritage or history on which the student’s could base their ideas. All we knew was that we had to climb a wall, he said.

“It was fun to work on our design and then come up with a unique solution,” said team member Keith Bates. “I’ve showed potential employers what I’ve been working on and they are in disbelief.”

Team member Garrett Vaughan said the team’s creation, and the win, is a great resume builder and that he will take what he has learned and apply it in his future engineering work.

“This is great for the USU mechanical and aerospace engineering department and really shows the caliber of our program, our teaching and our research,” Hansen said.

Under close supervision of Hansen and Wood, the hard work for the team paid off and it looks forward to passing the torch onto the next USU team that will compete. USU is slated to go the competition for the next two years.

“Understanding and learning to deal with ambiguity is a wonderful life lesson,” said USU College of Engineering dean Scott Hinton. “In spite of all the ambiguity in the competition, the students’ kept going, thinking on their feet, adapting and doing what needed to be done. Learning how to win comes from detail, working hard as a team and with an attitude that you are going to win. I am so proud of these students.”

Team member Steven Daniels echoed Dean Hinton’s sentiment when he said the team had a lot of confidence going into the competition. That played a big part in their win, he said.

Now the team will go on to try and secure a $100,000 grant to further develop its innovative idea for the Air Force.

While Iron Man and Spiderman may be comic book superheroes with incredible abilities only seen on the silver screen, this group of Utah State University engineering students might be on the right track to making some of those abilities closer to reality.

The USU team included fifteen mechanical and aerospace engineering seniors who were participating in their capstone engineering requirement.