Mobility Ideas

For general purpose mobility we envision at least two classes of machines:

• large "BobCat" sized vehicles that can move cement barriers, cars, etc.
• smaller human-sized machines made to work with and among people, in human environments

If we are going to climb (buildings, trees, poles, etc.) then there is a strong argument for a third class of smaller machines specialized for scansorial mobility. Why? Because vertical climbing does not scale in the same way as ground mobility. For example, falling is much less serious for small machines (and animals) than for large ones. All things being equal, strength ~ L^2 while mass ~ L^3.

-- MarkCutkosky - 06 Nov 2008