Tent stakes are not new tech yet I can't find any evidence of anyone ever making a self-driving one. I'm not convinced that there was a lot of testing of this thing; I can't imagine it working in my back yard and I've got 60% more gravity to work with. FIFTEEN FEET. The thing is supposed to penetrate fifteen feet of unknown dirt. Not "dig", penetrate. http://esmats.eu/amspapers/pastpapers/pdfs/2016/grygorczuk2.pdf It's got a Maxon DCX-22 motor - this one - which is 22mm in diameter. It's basically driving an impact wrench that isn't twisting. At all. Near as I can tell that motor tops out at 14W. That's about a 0.02 HP motor. The paper lists a 0.7W duty cycle every four seconds. Which has to generate enough force to compress a spring that can force what's effectively a paper towel tube through fifteen feet of unknown dirt. Yet that scientific paper mostly talks about coatings, as if the science of a self-hammering tent stake was settled. Apparently it was sold as a "mobile penetrometer." When you search for that on Youtube you get stuff like this: I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that NASA flew an experiment that had never been tested nor even seriously evaluated.Kinda seems like this was a project that wasn't all that well researched in 1997 and has made the rounds ever since.
