Areta is an auto-belay device for lead climbing, created in a 20 person team for my senior capstone. Throughout the project, I worked on engineering and design, taking insights from the research, physics, and marketing teams to create a functional and user-friendly product.
Skills: engineering analysis, Solidworks, prototyping, product design, interaction design, Adobe Illustrator
context:
There are three main types of rock climbing: bouldering, top roping, and lead climbing. An auto-delay device exists in top roping, and has been widely adopted by climbing gyms and competitions. In top roping, the climber is anchored at the top of their route, and the rope become shorter as they climb, and longer as they descend. However, in lead climbing, the climber is anchored at the bottom of the rock face and clips into more anchors as they move along their route. Therefore, the rope becomes longer both when the climber ascends and descends. This presents a unique challenge for an auto-belay device, one which my team sought out to conquer.
We began by prototyping devices to stop a falling climber.
A flipper on a loaded spring that would push the rope against a serrated wall.
A peg board that increased friction with sharp twists in the rope.
A combination of the two ideas that wedged the rope in between two disks with a sharp turn to increase friction.
However, our prototypes were not capable of distinguishing climbing from falling.
We decided to split into teams that would investigate a triggering mechanism that would allow our device to switch from climbing mode to falling mode, a lowering mechanism to ensure the climber could reach the ground safely, and an anchoring team to look into how the device would be mounted securely to the wall.
I worked on the three person triggering team to investigate: a pinch point used in traditional belay devices, a centrifugal clutch mechanism, and a governor system used commonly in engine controls.
We decided a centrifugal clutch was the best method to activate our lowering system,
Due to size constraints the triggering assembly was shrunk, with mathematical and Solidworks analysis to ensure that our system was still robust. When the climber ascends, the rope spins freely on a pulley, with the wishbone spinning at the same rate. When the climber falls and reached a critical velocity of 2 m/s, the wishbone spins out due to centrifugal motion and engages the damping system. Our team chose to use magnetic damping as it was the strongest and most durable of the methods we researched.
refining our design before integrating all components into an assembly that could be manufactured by us at mit.
I worked in a team of eight to complete a CAD assembly integrating the pulley, triggering and lowering mechanisms, and housing, using keys in the shaft to prevent relative rotation of all components. A team member created renders for presentation.
We tested and iterated until we had a working device,
and designed user interactions to create a product that could be used by real climbers.
I sketched several forms for the final device to discuss with the product team. I focused on communicating a rugged and high-tech design, with small touches that hinted towards how the device worked, and the rock climbing environment it was designed for.
I was individually responsible for Areta’s logo design and the graphic engravings on the device to instruct the user how to interact with it. I took notes from similar outdoor products, adding a mountain into the silhouette of an “A” that matched the shape of our product. For the engravings, I benchmarked other belay devices and used similar design language.
Our project culminated in a live presentation and demonstration of Areta catching a climber from a 30 foot fall.
Along with technical knowledge, I learned how to maintain healthy communication across a large team, and built great relationships with students and mentors.
