The machine that proved a student team could bore a tunnel.
Groundhog Alpha was built from nothing in under a year by a team that had never built a tunnel boring machine. It established the architecture every later Swissloop Tunneling machine has inherited: a hydraulic hexapod for steering, gripper-braced propulsion, and a liner extruded continuously behind the advancing head.
2nd place · Innovation & Design Award — Not-a-Boring Competition 2021 — Las Vegas, Nevada
Erosion, steering, lining and propulsion — every later machine inherited these answers.
A cone crusher behind a tungsten-carbide cutting wheel.
A cone crusher behind the wheel reduces stones to centimetre size before 10 bar water flushes them through a Venturi pump to the surface.
A custom hydraulic hexapod giving six degrees of freedom.
Six cylinders articulate the head against the body. Driven fast, they double as a 20 Hz jackhammer for ground the wheel alone cannot break.
Glass-fibre lamellas bonded by an on-board polymer 3D printer.
Instead of pre-cast segments, lamellas are bonded with a two-component polymer as the machine advances — a continuous 15 mm wall with no joints.
Sixteen cylinders bracing continuously against the tunnel wall.
Gripper plates brace against the finished wall while two alternating cylinder groups push, so thrust stays continuous.
Same architecture, rebuilt where it mattered — and a competition win.