Super Sticky Bots Climb Walls
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 23 of April , 2009 at 1:34 am
We’ve covered our share of wall climbing robots, including bots that climb with big grippers, little claws, vacuums, gecko toes, and even static electricity. Of all of these methods, the sticky ones seem to be the most versatile, and researchers at Carnegie Mellon are using synthetic sticky substances called elastomers to outfit their bots to climb:
These elastomers work on the same principle as gecko toes, using van der Waals forces of attraction between individual molecules. The advantage of this method is that you can stick the elastomer to anything that has a high enough density of molecules in it, but the disadvantage is that all kinds of other crap sticks to the elastomer too. Geckos solve the problem by licking their feet clean, but until someone invents a robot tongue, the next step is to create a new type of geckolastomer that uses nano-scale hairs that are so small, dirt particles can’t find enough surface area to stick to
VIA [ New Scientist ]
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Category: Biorobotics, Research
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