Slashdot Mirror
Robo-Gecko Climbs Glass
galactic_grub writes "Researchers at Stanford have developed a robot that mimics the extraordinary climbing skills of the Gecko. These creatures can climb sheer surfaces thanks to the intermolecular forces exerted by millions of tiny hairs their feet, called setae. The robot, Stickybot, has polymer pads on its feed with synthetic setae. Check out the video of it climbing up a sheet of glass."
Well.. if they had a camera.... they could spy on people in the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas...
Since its only a blurb, here is basically the article in full
A GECKO-like robot with sticky feet could soon be scampering up a wall near you. See a video of the robot in action here (24MB mov file). Geckos can climb up walls and across ceilings thanks to the millions of tiny hairs, or setae, on the surface of their feet. Each of these hairs is attracted to the wall by an intermolecular force called the van der Waals force, and this allows the gecko's feet to adhere. Stickybot, developed by Mark Cutkosky and his team at Stanford University in California, has feet with synthetic setae made of an elastomer. These tiny polymer pads ensure a large area of contact between the feet and the wall, maximising the van der Waals stickiness. The Pentagon is interested in developing gecko-inspired climbing gloves and shoes. Cutkosky says a Stickybot-type robot would also make an adept planetary rover or rescue bot. Frankly, I cant believe this tech couldnt have been done already, even twenty or thirty years ago. I have to imagine we've had the tech to do adhesiveness on demand based on an external stimuli ( such as electricity ) for many years. We have had the ability when the opposite material is metal since atleast the beginning of the space race, but even sticking to any surface on demand shouldnt be too difficult.
My question is, does the armies interest stem from creating an army of spidermen?
"These creatures can climb sheer surfaces thanks to the intermolecular forces exerted by millions of tiny hairs their feet, called setae."
They can climb a pair of nylons?
They could be used as small weapons filled with say gas to knock people out. People would all be like, oh look a cool gecko-ooo ARRGGHHH *hack hack hack..... thud*
I for one welcome our van der Waals force utilising Stickybot overloards.
:)
Seriously though, FTA "The Pentagon is interested in developing gecko-inspired climbing gloves and shoes." I want some of those, these if ever actually created (not sure what issues here would be but I assume mass, surface area and gravity would play in there somewhere) would have a huge impact on normal life. Just imagine the benefits to burglars, the next invention is going to have to be some very very slippery paint
The military and intelligence applications for robots like these could be immense. No doubt there would be a huge invasion of privacy outrage if people knew these robots were being used for spying of some sorts.
It was pretty cool, at Cal-Tech the gravity detector's mirrors were so flat that they didn't need adhesive to fix them in place.
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Thing is though, the military already has drones that can basically hover silently for hours and are the extremely small. I dont really see what the advantage of a wall hugger version would be unless 1) the ability to stick to the wall doesnt require any energy to maintain or 2) they are sufficently cheaper.
I agree. I don't understand what's involved to make this possible, ego, it must be easy!
Build me one of them search engine thingies. We'll go up against Google!
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
No spidermen, but they're certainly interested in small devices with sensors (cameras/chemicals) that can scale walls, crawl through small spaces, and go where no man has gone before.
They also mention the rescue bot - that sounds like a great application for a collapsed building.
My question is, does the armies interest stem from creating an army of spidermen?
Only if they have fricken... ahh forget it.
Sticky, wall climing, pilotless mini-tanks.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
But then they'll send the space station crashing down upon your house... http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilb ert-20060513.html
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Could this become part of a Geico commercial?
Maybe it can climb their server racks to figure out what's causing the burning plastic smell.
Mirrors, anyone?
-- n
Will I be able to park my flying car on windows?
Because you can - or because you should?
the site's not loading for me in firefox (it says infinite redirect loop, though it works in *spit* MSIE)/ Stickybot_040106.mov
here's the video URL:
http://bdml.stanford.edu/twiki/pub/Main/StickyBot
It didn't mimic the speed of a Gecko, though. That thing was dog slow, and about as sticky as a toy dart shot on a brick wall. Or a real dart for that matter.
Otherwise it was kinda cool.
hairs on their feet...
i wonder if its feed are similar to the concept of feet
It has only been in the last several years that scientists realized that gecko's use VDW forces to clime. It may seem obvious, but no one imagined that it would be possible to create enough VDW interactions to allow a large animal to stick to any surface. It works by simply increasing the surface contact to a ridiculous degree. What is amazing here is that this will work on any solid, clean surface. There are an extraordinary number of applications. Another huge benefit to this is that no energy is required to maintain adhesion.
First you animate. Then you SUSPEND!!!
My question is, does the armies interest stem from creating an army of spidermen?
I doubt the Army is interested in wall-climbing robots to make SpiderMen. More likely, they want man-portable devices that can climb up walls with sensors (for detection/observation), thin lead lines and anchors (to anchor a climbing rope that humans with packs can then climb), and so that they can scale up to hard-to-reach observation posts with remote-controlled sniper rifles.
Or maybe they just want us to think they actually care about Afghanistan, instead of ignore it so that only the Canucks and Brits are fighting the Real War.
Either way, I don't think we're likely to see a new commercial like this: "Be an Army of One! Climb Towers, Leap from Buildings, Spin Webs, and use your Spidey-Senses to detect enemy soldiers! Join the Spider Marines today!"
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Frankly, I cant believe this tech couldnt have been done already, even twenty or thirty years ago. I have to imagine we've had the tech to do adhesiveness on demand based on an external stimuli ( such as electricity ) for many years. We have had the ability when the opposite material is metal since atleast the beginning of the space race, but even sticking to any surface on demand shouldnt be too difficult.
The big problem with gecko gloves or any other application of this principle is keeping them clean. The same force that lets this material stick to glass makes it an absolute magnet for dirt.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
besides adding this stuff to a robogeico?
:(
:(
Last of heard of this technique it had a problem in that it gets dirty VERY quickly and starts losing its sticky
Having to hire a window washing crew everytime i want to play spiderman downtown gets too expensive and really slows down those rescues
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2002/
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3785
This isn't anything new. It just hasn't become useful enough to be adapted publicly.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Several women at Stanford's Delta Sigma Theta sorority have reported sightings of strange reptilian creatures crawling around and affixing themselves to the exterior windows of their campus bathroom facilities. Sally Railmane, a sophomore at the school, described a strange light burst, similar to a camera flash, coming from the window creatures as she stepped out of the shower this afternoon. "It was creepy" she said.
University officials were unavailable for comment.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
Glass is pretty rough stuff on a molecular level though, and there are so many varieties of it and methods of polishing the surface of glass - teflon however, with such a low surface energy, would have been a much more revealing test. On another (slightly OT) note, it's a shame to see military applications first in line to be mentioned. I don't mean to downplay their importance in bankrolling many innovative technologies and applications but for possible wartime uses to be implied between the lines after every new discovery has to play some influence on how Americans (and brits to a lesser extent) view war - something other than atrocious.
Mod points for being off topic be damned, Im just delighted to see that you know Canadians are picking up the slack in Afghanistan. Im not kidding in any way here, its heartening to see that people notice our small but meaningful contribution. Many people based on Canada for not supporting Iraq, but seemed to forget that we have our people dying in Afghanistan as part of the war on terror too.
How do the geckos keep their pads clean?
splunge (n) -- A good idea.. but it could be lousy... and I'm not being indecisive!
I'd buy one, but I am sure the robo-gecko will be full of bugs.
Can it offer me up to 50% off my car insurance?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Mark Cutkosky
Why, after seeing the mention of "Government" in that article, does that name look like Mark Cut Cost"-ky ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
It's bad enough knowing that we're getting closer every day to the moment when robots decide that we're just too much damned trouble to keep around but do we have to keep developing new things to make them impossible to escape from? Anyone else see this and start connecting the slashdot articles?
There was the one about the Japanese chick robot followed by the similar South Korean model, then a little farther back we have our artificial "muscle".
Combine those with the story a year or so back about the robots that power themselves by digesting organic matter and frankly all my best nightmares start out on Slashdot. I'll probably be in my 60's when the sexy Japanese carnivorous wall climbing robots with super strength come to get me.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Not only can it render HTML, CSS, XML, SVG, W3C, MCP, MJB, DVD, BVD, and other TLAs, but it can climb walls, too!
I don't see that showing up in IE7! Hah!
The feet are unpowered polymer pads covered with spikes, essentially. That doesn't require power to maintain the grip.
Moving, as you no doubt noticed, requires that the pads be peeled backwards. Thousands of microscopic spikes provide tremendous traction, but it isn't going to impact tyres that much (yet). Perhaps climbing apparatus will see this material soon.
I'm not your average American, I actually served in the Canadian Army, mostly in mountain troops, and thus my comments on the robo gecko technology uses for military applications. But, yes, I am a Yank. Heard about the combat death of the Canadian soldier who died last week, think she was from Alberta, in a combat MOC as I understand.
...
Still, wouldn't you rather it was a robot gecko climbing up there first, rather than a person? Especially if it slips or falls or is shot down
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
...is a radioactive spider and you too can climb walls.
Frankly, I would always rather see a machine killed over a human. Sadly, in military thinking im the exception to the norm. It really does boil down to total cost of ownership ( TOC ) like in any other business. That depresses me greatly, but point blank the military assigns a value to each "asset" and acts accordingly. To use a horrible example, if the military had to chose between sacraficing an empty billion dollar aircraft carrier or a dozen troops, we both know how they will choose.
But I am both happy with any technology that saves or prevents the loss of human life ( on either side of the conflict to be honest ) and to know that some people out there know that first off, we have a military in Canada and secondly, they understand the contributions we do infact make. I would say 99% of Americans dont realize Canada sent troops to both Veitnam and Korea, let alone the fact that we do infact have special forces ( yes... Canada actually has special forces... ) in Iraq as we speak.
Bravo to you, and I hope your experiences along side the Canadian army were good ones.
-- Shoe Lace
It may climb walls, but can it also save you thousands on car insurance?
Shedding, maybe?
Where are my mod points when I need them? Well played Clerks, well played.
No, I didn't know that.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
How well does this stuff grip slippery surfaces like beer bottles or oiled/sweaty human skin? There might be some interesting applications for gloves if it does.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
i believe i remember having read about this sort of thing before.
if i remember correctly, the climbing bit is achieved by a combination of friction (between all the little hair things, there is a rather lot of surface area when they all lay sideways) and static cling. between those effects, this stuff can support a pretty fantastic amount of weight.
unless they've found a way around it, the major problem was the gunk (dirt and stuff) kept getting in amongst the hairs and clogging them up, thus eliminating the effect. maybe they found a way to clean the things, as real geckos do.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Its the mysterious blue smoke that runs all electronics. If they've let the mysterious blue smoke out, that's it for the servers. They'll never work again.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
My question is why can't this be done much more easily with suction instead? I mean like a hollow round thing you suck the air out of so you don't fall of. You see people in crime-movies all the time using that to remove glass they've just cut. That seems like a much more viable solution for a non-organic unit.
Something like this has already been done at the CMU nanorobotics lab.
I saw a presentation on this work last year. The concept of tiny hairs sticking to surfaces is not difficult. The tricky part is keeping the hairs clean, because they stick to EVERYTHING, quickly develop a coating of dust and stop sticking. Scientists have yet to mimick the self-cleaning properties of Gecko feet as they curl off the surface after each step. Until they do, robo-geckos will not function long except in a well-scrubbed lab.
"I love his boyish charm, but I hate his childishness" - Leela
shame on you for putting humans over machines on slashdot! kill all humans!
I'm gonna build my own slashdot, with hookers and blackjack. In fact, forget the slashdot.
Anyone notice the date on the video? April 1st 2006. Could it just be small suction cups on a cool bot and not something more spactacular?
:)
Although i think this is a cool bot in itself, I never trust anything released on April 1st
Namely, the Register, who have been mapping out the links in the global robo-conspiracy for some time now:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/science/rotm/
A very amusing read...
Read Pynchon.
Remember when spiderman used to need to build webshooters, because he did not actually have the ability to make his own webbing? Well now he doesnt need the ability to climb walls! He just wears gloves and boots of this stuff, and he can climb walls! That and a bit of speed, and you the the Amazing Spiderman!
can you get one on a cool crown! Look at him go! Look at him go!
Obligatory plug for the movie Madagascar.
Here's the web site for the project.
They have a new and powerful fabrication technique, too. They use a stereolithography machine to make their parts, but they use it in an unusual way. They use a machine that's intended to make multicolored objects from several different colored materials, and load it up with materials with different physical and electrical properties. So they can make a one-piece 3D part with soft parts and hard parts, or insulating parts and conductive parts. This is the beginning of a whole new kind of fabrication, which is what Cutkowsky is really into.
These creatures can climb sheer surfaces thanks to the intermolecular forces exerted by millions of tiny hairs their feet, called setae.
I, for one, can't wait for the "at home" version.
What I don't uderstand is why the gecko's feet don't get dirty, losing its stickyness. I have played with them a lot as a child and never observed them licking their feet to clean them. They can run over dirt and up a wall, without pausing to clean their feet. So somehow, a gecko must be able to control the stickyness of their feet, allowing them to shed any dirt on the fly.
I can finish making my "spidy" suit....
(sala) manDerWalls forces.
Someone will probably bring up the old glass windows with thick bits at the bottom as an incorrect example of glass flowing (creeping) over time at room temperature. Consider - if you are a very clever person building a Cathedral with very large heavy glass windows of varying cross section, which end would you put at the bottom? The float glass method we use today was not around centuries ago, so builders did not have the nice panes of glass we have today.
The disordered glassy state is also possible in metals and can have some advantages - for instance in an iron based glass the magnetic properties are very good and the strength is high. These materials are made with the right mixture of elements and a very rapid cooling rate (molten to solid in milliseconds) and are not stable at room temperature - but are called "metastable" because it will take centuries at room temperature to diffuse into the stable crystalline structure.
One last thing - crystalline solids like lead alloys flow too with a high enough temperature and stress - like big lead organ pipes hundreds of years old or high pressure steam tubing over a few years. You don't need the glassy structure for creep to occur.
Didn't even bother to read the article, eh, my Candian friend?
"Each of these hairs is attracted to the wall by an intermolecular force called the van der Waals force, and this allows the gecko's feet to adhere."
It's not your comment that pisses me off, it's the fact that it got moderated up... BAD MODS! NO COOKIE!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
And in a further development, when questioned about the fact that these "revolutionary" feet look, act, and sound suspiciously like suction cups, the lead scientist ran out of the room, mumbling something about misleading names for racehorses...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
How do the geckos keep their pads clean?
I don't know for sure, but one option that biological geckos have that robots don't is that they can let the pads wear out and grow back, continually renewing the surface.
-- Alastair
I think I remember reading that geckos can't stick to teflon, as teflon doesn't support Van der Waals forces.
Oh wait... nevermind.
RoboGecko Pad Replacement Manager upon finding out that the latest rev of RoboGecko's can replace their own pads: I felt a great disturbance in the RoboGecko Pad Replacement Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
http://www.powscience.com/store/actionproducts/cli mbatron.html
Had one and worked better than that Gecko thing - no cable and no falling off either!
Dirt, and itself:
http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/7/6/4/1 has details and pictures of the progress as of 2003; the material worked in the short term, but got clogged with dirt as you mentioned... and the setae stuck to themselves, as can be seen in the second picture there.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
Just imagine if this technology could be integrated into a Spiderman costume for this Halloween! Someone could actually really look AND climb like the wall climber himself! If they had some containers of webbing they could even spray people from up above. Of course there would be legal issues to deal with because probably someone would be climbing too high, fall off a wall, and then sue. Personally, I think some products should be able to have a label on them saying if you open this and do something stupid to get yourself hurt it is your own fault. However, I think a Spiderman costume with this technology imitiating the natural features of the Gecko would be the STAR of any Halloween Party! I wonder if the makers of this technology are planning anything special for this Halloween!
Technobunga - Refreshing High Tech Geek Fuel and Modern Happenings
For fans of PhD Comics, Mark Cutkosky was artist Jorge Cham's advisor.
I assume you are aware that glass is in fact a liquid at room temp.
u id
I would like to point your attention to this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass#Glass_as_a_liq
Of course it's full of bugs. Bugs are what robo-geckos eat!
Well color me uneducated! F-ing public schools! I hate that things I take for granted - like basic principles taught to me in grade school or high school science classes - are often incorrect in their own right.
I know I should question everything I am taught - but if I were to question every single thing I was taught as a younster I'd need to live to 150 years old.
So I guess I'll go ahead assuming that 2+2=4, but when my kid comes home and tell me that glass is a liquid, I'm gonna have to have a sit down with him. Sigh.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
I see a couple good uses
1. Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell game and stealth technologies - stealth and sticky cameras becoming more achievable for real world applications.
2. The human spiderman - No need to worry about anyone dying from climbing sky scrapers. Now everybody can be a human spiderman.
I love how the picture in the article is at 250x147, but you can enlarge it to a whopping... 290x171. Yes, you can increase the dimensions of the picture by an astounding SIXTEEN PERCENT! Why do they even bother unless they're going to at least double the image size?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
2+2=4 is only valid for sufficiently low values of 2.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
(from the article I linked: "Contact mechanical models suggest that self-cleaning occurs by an energetic disequilibrium between the adhesive forces attracting a dirt particle to the substrate and those attracting the same particle to one or more spatulae. We propose that the property of self-cleaning is intrinsic to the setal nanostructure and therefore should be replicable in synthetic adhesive materials in the future.")
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
But can it save me money on my car insurance?
Excellent Phoenix AZ Office Space - Thistle Landing
I'm actually curious what/when public schools taught this. I've certainly never been taught that glass was a liquid.
What happens when the setae (natural or artificial) get dusty? How do you clean these things to keep them sticky?
yes, i did read the article. maybe you should read my post.
i said that i remember reading about something similar. i didn't say that it was the exact same thing.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
You must be a Manager. That type of attitude reaps rewards!
"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been wide
"These creatures can climb sheer surfaces thanks to the intermolecular forces exerted by millions of tiny hairs their feet, called setae."
That, and a pole with some fishing wire. If you watch the video, there isn't anything that suggests that the guy is doing anything but pulling it up the glass with his fishing pole.
Have you read about those neat demos that materials engineers sometimes do where they drop a lead ball bearing onto a brick of amorphous steel, and the bearing continues bouncing for about two minutes because of how close to perfectly-elastic the collisions are? Now that is some cool shit. Materials engineers are truly the nerds' nerds, an inspiration to us all.