Climbing the ‘power ascension’ market
Since MIT spinout Atlas Devices’ flagship product, the Atlas Powered Rope Ascender (APA), first hit the market in 2007, it’s been touted by media as a real-world version of Batman’s famed utility-belt grappling gun: At the pull of a trigger, the handheld device can hoist two people about 30 stories up a rope in 30 seconds. Exciting, for sure. But despite its appeal as what Atlas co-founder and APA co-inventor Nathan Ball ’05, SM ’07 calls a “gee-whiz gadget” — with seemingly limitless, and sometimes fantastical, applications — the device is becoming a practical tool for motorized scaling (or “power ascension”) in the military and other fields. Roughly the size of a small shoebox, the aluminum-cased APA — which began as a prototype for MIT’s Soldier Design Competition in 2005 — has a handle with direction control switches (up or down) and a trigger. An innovative rope-feeding, capstan-based mechanism ensures...