Cliff Stoll's Robot Forklift for carrying boxes of Klein Botles

Here's my homebrew forklift, which I use to bring boxes from my under-the-house storage. Below my house is a 30 inch tall crawlspace; I use it to store Klein Bottles for my home micro-business, Acme Klein Bottles (I can't understand why zero volume Klein Bottles take up so much space)
I built the forklift from 1/2 inch plywood; the up-down motion uses slide-bearings originally for kitchen drawers. A 12 volt right-angle drill drives a 5/16ths x 18 threaded rod. It can lift 50 pounds up & down, about 16 inches. (The weight is limited by counterbalance; with enough counterweights, it can lift 100+ pounds).
The tilt-back mechanism uses simple door hinges and the electric drive motor from the rear-window lifter in an old Pontiac. When I built it, I hadn't realized how important the tilt mechanism would be - I use it more than the up/down system.
The two drive wheels are from Parallax systems; they use windshield-wiper motors with non-reciprocating gearing. Since each wheel is separately driven, it can turn on its own radius. All this is controlled using a futaba 4 channel radio operating at 2.4 GHz.
Three video cameras allow the forklift to be remotely operated. One camera looks from the level of the fork, the second camera looks from the top, and a third camera looks backwards. (these operate on 1.2 GHz band, so as not to interfere with wifi & the 2.4 GHz Futaba radio connection)
That black 12 volt, 10 amp-hour battery supplies electricity and also serves as counterweight. For heavier lifting, I add several more batteries, only for their mass. You'll see two red panel meters; these show battery voltage and current.
Not shown here is the Ardunio based line follower which uses five downward pointing LED's & photodiodes to follow the black tape on the concrete floor. This works fine, but is unnecessary, since it's so easy to manually control the forklift robot.
A major consideration is the pallets under each box. To make the pallets, I cut 2 inch foam blocks from rigid insulation. 2 inches is plenty high for the forklift to reach, and keeps the cardboard boxes off the floor to avoid dampness. I standardized on 12x14x16 inch boxes; the forklift allows me to stack these 2-high in the 30 inch crawlspace. I label each box on all sides, so it's fairly easy to take inventory.
The next version will be more compact - a circular footprint, rather than elongated (so as to turn without striking a box behind it). This will allow me to narrow the aisles, and so store more boxes. However, a smaller footprint will mean a shorter leverarm for the counterweights, so the tail-mass may be heavier. Also, I will add a barcode reader for the front of the forklift, and improve the line-following/positioning odometer system.
-Cliff Stoll September 2012

[@RowanAckerman]

@Cliff Stoll
Hi Cliff,
I don't know if you'll see this, but hopefully you will.
I really want to see what happens when the edge of a circle with circumference 1 is attached to the edge of a Möbius strip with origional length 1/2.
It's a shape called the Projective Plane.
I was hoping you (or someone you know) could do this in some way out of glass.
Thanks!
~Rowan Ackerman

[@triprack]

Hello Cliff,
I would like to purchase one of your Klein Bottles. Where may I do so?

[@MaxSwineberg]

***** From another video I watched, it looks like he named it "Phoebe".