AD371 - Shoreham Fort

This is a university project base around the Napoleonic fort at Shoreham beach on the south coast.

With a final goal of building a film studio/school of some description our first task was to create a 'camera device' to observe and interact with the site.

I conceived a device which would use the existing railings on site to take long tracking shots.

The main problem to overcome were the large lugs where the rail attached to it's posts.

After a few weeks of prototyping I set about laser-cutting my creation from MDF.

The main design consisted of several of theses notched wheels. Each wheel has four sets of bearings which sit on the rail and allow it to roll along.

When the device reaches one of the lugs on the rail, the large notched wheel will rotate, stepping over the lug and landing on it's next set of bearings.

A series of neodymium disc magnets are used to confine the wheels to 90 ° rotations, to ensure that they are always sitting properly on their bearings.

Device on site

The final device has 3 sets of 3 wheels. Each set is distributed around the rail to grip it firmly and provide a smooth ride.

The long legs help add balance and keep the lower sets of wheels in contact with the rail.

And finally here is a gif of the crawler working.

My crawler device was grouped together with two others, a camera mount that was triggered every time the crawler took a 'step', as well as a pedal powered drive system.
Whilst the camera mount worked relatively well, we had trouble rigging up the drive in the pouring rain (bad timing for our final installation).

I made another trip on a sunny day to get these pictures, but didn't have the other parts.

Still I'm pleased that the stepping action performs as intended.