Stanford Robotics @ NRW: Stickybot III
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 15 of April , 2010 at 3:17 am
We’ve covered a bunch of different climbing robots from Stanford around here, including RiSE, Spinybot, and (my favorite) Stickybot. Yesterday at Stanford’s National Robotics Week event, we were introduced to Stickybot III, a brand new incarnation of their gecko-inspired climbing robot. Apparently, Stickybot III was completed mere weeks ago, and while they’re still working on its actual climbing moves, we got a sneak peek:
Stickybot III is able to stick to glass by using an adhesive material that mimics gecko feet. Gecko toes are covered in bajillions of microscopic hairs that are so tiny that they are attracted to the very molecules in the surface that they’re on. So, the material is not sticky in the sense that you’re probably used to thinking about, rather the material is attracted to the surface directly through Van der Waals forces. You can read more about this here.
Lots more, after the jump.
The difficulty in getting Stickybot III to climb is due in large part to the way the sticky pads are attached to its feet. Gecko feet use a bunch of different pliable layers of the sticky hairs, which maximizes the surface area of their feet that makes contact with the surface that they’re trying to stick to. Stickybot III, on the other hand, only has a few layers, so if the feet aren’t oriented properly with respect to the surface, a lot of the adhesion is lost… As you can see in the next pic, not very much of the adhesive material is actually making contact with the glass. It’s a testament to how strong this stuff is that Stickybot still sticks:
I bet you’re wondering when somebody is going to have the bright idea to stick some of those super adhesive pads on some gloves to let you run up the sides of buildings like a superhero. The US military is way ahead of you, they’ve been working on something called the Z-Man Program. Nobody’s allowed to talk about what exactly the Z-Man program is, but it may or may not involve creating a system that will allow a soldier in full combat load to scale a 25 foot wall in 15 seconds or less. It also may or may not be gobbling up a significant portion of the gecko adhesive material that Stanford is creating for Stickybot. Feel free to let your imagination run wild with that.
We’ve been invited to visit Stickybot in it’s home lab at Stanford, and we’ll have updates for you when it figures out how to get climbing.
Comments (5)
Category: Biorobotics,Research
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