Moving on Up, Stairs

Final

William Ferguson and Louie Adamian

Do you know how many people it takes to bring a baby stroller up stairs? There are two reasonable solutions. One solution is to have another person pick up the front of the stroller while you pick up the back of the stroller and carry the stroller up the stairs. Another solution is picking up the baby and dragging the stroller up the stairs behind you. Now, you have no need to worry about how you will get your stroller and baby safely up the stairs, for we have created the Stair Climber. The Stair Climber is a stroller that can safely go up and down stairs. The problem we tried to tackle is people having trouble taking their babies and strollers safely up the stairs. The Stair Climber does this at the switch of a button, in a safe and efficient manner. The Stair Climber is a fairly simple piece of machinery. It works with four motors each attached to individual wheels. These wheels are not your ordinary wheels. The wheels have the ability to go into Stair Climbing and descending mode. In this version, the wheel simple overlaps some of its pieces to create a cross-like wheel to propel itself up and down the stairs. The motors run with a simple flick of a switch, located at the back of the stroller. There is also one nine volt battery that powers all of the motors which spin the wheels.

For our first design, we were going to use a half circle to climb the stairs and I worked on that for over a day before realising that would not work. For the second iteration, we went to a design that was just an X with nothing sticking out of the sides. We quickly realised that we would need more traction than that design offered more traction that is when we went to the current wheel shape but only one wheel. Then when working Monday we came up with the idea to use two wheels. the two wheels allow you to climb upstairs yet still have a smooth ride on flat ground. We spent the rest of the week improving on this design. was building the model staircase. The staircase was very hard to build. David helped us a lot by teaching us the way in which the staircase should be assembled so it can hold the appropriate amount of weight. We also had multiple iterations of our stroller before we ended up with our final product.