It’s no secret that one critical factor in the 2009 competition success of LaserMotive came from extensive testing of the climber at the team’s facility on the specially designed vertical treadmill, which allows the team the opportunity to collect real time data on Otis’s performance, as well as seeing how the machine performs over a full kilometer test without having to leave the office.

Like a car taking practice laps on a racetrack, the treadmill allows the team a chance to test new ideas and combinations to find out what works the best before the actual race begins.

And with a bigger, better goal and prize on the line for Phase 2, it was time for a better treadmill.

Back in January, the entire team took a quick break from working on their individual systems to help topple the 18-foot treadmill, tipping it on to its side to begin work. It is the first time in a year that the giant piece of machinery came down, leaving something of an empty space in the back corner of the team’s shop.

The formerly vertical treadmill. Watch your head!

The plan is to retrofit the treadmill to include a motor-driven wheel that will allow the team to measure the output of the climbing vehicle’s motor, effectively turning the treadmill into a dynamometer.

In addition, the bicycle wheels that guide the cable around the treadmill are being replaced with double-walled wheels to cut down on vibrations created when the cable passes over the spots where the spokes connect to the rims. Such vibrations may not seem like something that could cause such a major difference, but the more accurate the data you can gather, the better your vehicle will be. One of the wheels is also being put on a moving axis to allow the team to control the tension on the cable, which despite being metal can stretch, changing the conditions on the treadmill. Because the cable is a fixed length, the addition of the fifth wheel requires the top of the treadmill to also be lowered some to accommodate the new, wider path of the cable.

It’s a lot of work, but the ability of the team to test and retest the climber in conditions that simulate the real world challenge and make the adjustments based on test results instead of theories is one of the things that helped LaserMotive claim the Level 1 prize in November.

Now the hope is the new and improved treadmill can help get Otis into tip-top shape when the team goes after the Level 2 prize later this year!

As we mentioned before, NASA held a technical symposium and recognition ceremony on February 25th and 26th for all the 2009 Centennial Challenge winners and the allied organizations which ran the competitions. Twitter comments were at #nasacc. Will Pomerantz from the X-Prize Foundation wrote a great summary of the event.

During the Power Beaming session on the 25th, Jordin and Tom gave a presentation on LaserMotive’s technology development for the competition, and the directions we see power beaming going in the future. We were joined in that session by Brian Turner from KCSP, and Ben Shelef from the Spaceward Foundation.

The presentations from the other Challenges were uniformly interesting. As Will Pomerantz commented, it seemed to be true for every competition that “the teams that shared the most information with the general public eventually won the competition.” Over the last few years, we tried sharing what we were doing, and I’d like to work on sharing even more this year. The biggest obstacle is time.

It was interesting, in the middle of the day during the symposium, to hear NASA’s new Chief Technologist, Bob Braun, speak about his new job and his thoughts on the future. And as I tweeted, it was very refreshing to hear someone in his position admit that he didn’t have an answer to a question and, rather than making something up or being non-committal, he said he would work on finding an answer.

The next day was the recognition ceremony. We were honored to be recognized by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.

We’re all excited to hear the messages coming from both Chief Technology Braun and Administrator Bolden. They both seem to “get it” and are working to move NASA in the direction of innovating new technologies and supporting industry as they try to innovate, rather than simply operating ‘traditional’ systems. We have high hopes for what we’ll see coming out of NASA in the next few years.

After the ceremony, teams from all the various Challenges got up on stage for one big group photo:

Many thanks to NASA IPP DIrector Doug Comstock and Centennial Challenges Director Andrew Petro for all their hard work for the event!

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!

First, the (relatively) big news: LaserMotive today beamed roughly 400 watts of laser power to a moving target at a distance of 1 kilometer, as part of the vertical laser alignment procedure. The target was a retro-reflective board a little larger than 1 meter on a side. I don’t know offhand if that is a record; I will have to check once things calm down. (It’s a record that will likely be broken tomorrow by one or more teams, of course.)

And now let’s back up. Things have been very exciting at the competition so far (you can follow our Twitter feed at #LaserMotive and the SE Blog’s tweeting at #SEGames). Sunday we did a bunch of setup at the staging area, which went well. We felt good about how much we did in the time available. Monday had us going out to the lakebed, where we got re-situated and settled in for the whole week. We did our alignment in the trailer, and at the end of the day when we did the 300 meter horizontal laser alignment, we did not have to tweak anything — the beams were as centered (relative to our tracking camera view) as we could tell. Throughout all of this, our entire team has been doing great work getting all of our systems (climber vehicle systems, tracking, command center ops, etc.) up and operational, and it appears that nothing was damaged during the trip down from Seattle.

Tuesday was the start of helicopter operations. There were a number of problems with test climber vehicle launch and landings for other teams, because things were not as smooth as they’d been during the tests in Washington. The launches and landings here were more “violent” and our causing quite a bit of concern. Multiple teams are working frantically tonight trying to deal with what we all saw today. And as I mentioned above, we did our vertical 1 kilometer alignment at the (relativeyl) low power of roughly 400 watts output, at the very end of the day. We are the first (and so far only) team to have completed vertical laser alignment. Wednesday morning we expect there will be more helicopter tests of climber launch & landing plus final vertical alignment for the other two teams. Then the real competition begins!

Here are some photos that we tweeted this week:

• Tom in our command center
• Lunch on the lakebed
• (Lack of) humidity on the lakebed
• Another beautiful morning on the lakebed (thanks to all our sponsors!)
• Most of our team in the command center, waiting for helicopter operations to begin again.
• View of the ground-apex and the cable from inside our trailer, just after we finished our vertical laser alignment.

It’s time for me to go to bed. We arrive at Dryden (a half hour from our hotel) before 5am each day, and we don’t seem to get back to the hotel until after 7pm or 8pm, and then do things like blog and talk to our families. We see the (nice full) moon setting when we start the day, and we see it rising when we end the day. We’ll all be glad to get a regular night’s sleep one of these days!

We have another sponsor who was also able to aid us by providing space for testing. Silver Springs Organics and Cattle Ranch not only was the site for the two helicopter tests by Spaceward, but also for some long-range laser testing by LaserMotive.

It may be hard to see in the photo, but we were actually on a slightly elevated area, so we could point down at a target 1km away, which also had forest in the distance. All of the visible land is owned by Silver Springs, and we were pointed well below the horizon, so happily we were able to safely conduct high power, long range laser tests.

We want to thank Greg and everyone at Silver Springs for all of the support!

I want to welcome REI (specifically, their flagship store in Seattle) as our newest sponsor, and thank them for letting us use the Pinnacle for climbing tests. (By the way, they’re having a fall sale – go here for a 20% off coupon if you’re an REI member.)

We wanted to do some test climbs to a higher altitude than the ~18 feet we can get in our shop, and luckily the flagship REI store was excited to let us use their climbing tower. Normally it’s for human rock climbers, but heck, a climber’s a climber, so we took our system, hung a cable from their #11 “beyond vertical” path, and shot up faster than any human has climbed that path!

Afterwards, a member of the REI staff presented our climber with an “I climbed the REI Pinnacle” certificate.

Here’s the certificate:

Thanks again to REI!

There were a number of issues with the first batch of helicopter testing that Spaceward conducted back in July in preparation for the power beaming contest (now tentatively scheduled for mid-October). They wound up switching to a different helicopter company. The new one is based south of Seattle (near Olympia), and was found by Brent from the LaserMotive team.

Saturday was the first test of the helicopter with GPS hovering and with the new method of deploying and anchoring the cable (which I will let Ben talk about on the competition site), but limited to 1,000 feet altitude. We decided to go down to observe, help out, put some miles on our trailer, and maybe do a bit of tracking practice. I’ll post more about the site later, but it was a wonderful location.

Here are some photos from the day. Click to see a larger version.

Overall, we were very impressed with how the pilot handled the cable. Once at the full height, any movement was small and gradual. We’re looking forward to the next set of tests, when they go all the way to 5,000 feet!

…It Cooks!

There are always more tests one can do when developing a new system, especially one like ours that is so different from what’s been done before. During one recent test, we ran our lasers at high power to evaluate some of our optics, and as usual we dumped the beam into our foamed carbon beam stops. But why let all that energy go to waste, especially when it’s easy to skip meals while working late? So we decided to grill some hot dogs while running the test. Here’s the result:

Yum! And here is a video of the cooking process. Next time we’ll have to throw an IR filter on the camcorder to reduce the brightness of the laser light.

We still have some spare hot dogs in the fridge, so if we need to do another test like this, we’ll probably cook some more. This time, we just need to remember to bring some condiments…

Check out this awesome new motor we got!

Nearly 18 inches long, and super heavy. Won’t that look great on our climber?!

What’s that you say? You think it would be better used for some other function? Huh. Where do you think it should be used?

A couple of years ago, we noted the effects of intense laser beams on beam stops such as foamed carbon. In that post, we used a 1kW laser at low power, only a couple hundred watts if memory serves. It was also less than one meter from the target, and was on for less than a minute. Yet we still oxidized the carbon, which was evident before seeing the burn mark – it was glowing slightly orange with the laser on.

Last weekend we took our new 2kW+ laser and fired it near full power. It was above 50% power (we ramped up slowly from 50% to ~90%) for nearly five minutes. This time, the target was roughly 7 meters away, and the beam at the target was roughly 2 inches by 8 inches. Not only did we still oxidize the carbon, but we fried off some surface layers of carbon and then wound up cracking the block all the way through! You could still feel the heat coming off the back side of the block a couple of minutes later. Here’s what the block looked like a few seconds after we turned off the laser:

Yes, it’s still glowing red hot (the small red dot is our alignment laser pointer). And here’s a close-up a few minutes later, showing the oxidation damage as well as the crack (we’re pretty sure it was thermal stress that cracked the block):

These images just reinforce that the level of power we’re using for power beaming is beyond “just” eye danger and well into the realm of immediate skin danger – at the peak in the center of the beam, the power density was probably greater than 300 normal solar intensity. Our lasers from 2006 were powerful but the brightness was not as high as the new laser. Dilas has done an impressive job in increasing the brightness of the laser, and as a result the beam is much better collimated, so it stays very intense over a much longer distance. That is part of what enables us to beam adequate power over a kilometer away. It is also why so many safety precautions need to be taken in order to beam power outdoors (e.g., for the Beam Power competition).