Scientists love looking to nature for inspiration, and the folks at Stanford University’s Center for Design Research are no different. Professor of mechanical engineering and co-director of the Center Mark Cutkosky and his colleagues have been working for the last five years to build climbing robots. Their latest generation of a wall-climber, the Stickybot III, was inspired by the gecko lizard, which has phenomenal capabilities for climbing any vertical surface, including glass. In fact, a gecko can support its entire body weight with one toe.
Mimicking a gecko toe is no easy feat. The animal's toe contains hundreds of ridges called lamellae, and on each of those ridges are millions of tiny hairs called setae. Looking closer, the ends of the setae have even smaller strands called spatulae. The molecules inside the spatulae become attracted to molecules on wall or ceiling surfaces in a way that is somewhat analogous to how magnets are attracted to each other. The attraction is called a van der Waals force.
Cutkosky's Stickybot doesn't rely on van der Waals forces but mimics it. The latest version of bot has a two-layered structure to the foot, one that's similar to the gecko's lamellae and setae. It's made from an adhesive rubber-like material that contains tiny polymer hairs that allows the robot to climb wood paneling, painted metal and glass.
The teams' next step is to build a robot that has rotating ankles. And eventually, the researchers want to scale up the technology to human-sized pads that would allow a person to literally climb the walls. Crazy!
Check out the video.
Tags: Biomimetics, Nanomaterials, Robotics, Robots
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