The Otis Diet
Written by Brian Beckley on Thursday, February 11th, 2010
Or: “How to lose 15 percent of your body weight in 24 hours.”
(This article goes into more detail than our earlier post on happened for the final day of the 2009 power beaming competition.)
After securing the prize for successfully completing Level 1 of the Power Beaming Challenge by climbing the 1 km at a pace of 3.8 meters per second (nearly twice the required 2 m/s), the LaserMotive team pulled out all the stops in an attempt to qualify for the Level 2 prize and take home the additional $1.1 million in prize money.
Level 2 requires the climbers to complete the challenge at a pace of 5 meters per second and the team knew the only way to do that would be for Otis to drop some weight.
Not even the metal on the photovoltaic cells survived the mad dash to drop weight.
At a svelte 5 kg, there wasn’t a whole lot of fat to trim, but with no time to develop the proper package of diet and exercise, the decision was made to start simply removing as much excess material as possible.
Turning a critical eye, the team began removing all non-essential equipment and even cutting into the frame and trimming everything, from the circuit boards to various data-collection devices added to help the team learn as much as possible about their tries.
But with the money on the line, the team decided it was more important to drop some weight and make a run at the prize than anything else. No system went untouched. Everything was fair game.
Holes were drilled in guide wheels to reduce weight.
Sensors for the motor, a thermocouple to measure temperature, connectors that would allow the team to replace subsystems that were no longer necessary, heat sinks, wires and protectors – the protective frame was both the biggest weight and the most frightening to remove – were all removed or modified.
Once everything that could be taken off was, the team went even further, cutting into the frame and removing small strips of support metal and even drilling holes through the online skate wheels used to guide Otis up the ribbon.
Even the circuit board fell victim to the saw as the team cut into the unused parts of the board, leaving the once smooth-sided circuit board looking like a puzzle piece.
A before and after look at the circuit board. Every gram counts.
By the time Otis was ready for his run at the Level 2 prize, he had dropped a total of 0.7 kg, coming in at his new fighting weight of 4.3 kg.
That may not sound like a lot, but it comes to 16 percent of Otis’s body mass. That would be like a 165-pound man dropping 26.4 pounds overnight.
In the end, the lighter, faster Otis improved his speed as he headed up the ribbon, but a combination of too much laser power early in the race (which blew a power converter) and accidentally dragging the launch platform along doomed the effort to exceed 5 m/s averaged over a climb.
The challenge now for the team is to find a way to get that last 20% of perrformance understood and under control before they head back to Dryden for the Level 2 prize.
How will Otis drop the rest of the weight and pick up his speed? Tough to know, but you can bet Otis will be working out hard on the treadmill to get back into fighting shape.
Cue the Rocky theme! Getting strong now!