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?
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
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.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
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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.
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
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.
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!!!
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.
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.
I'd buy one, but I am sure the robo-gecko will be full of bugs.
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!
...is a radioactive spider and you too can climb walls.
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 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
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.
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.
I can finish making my "spidy" suit....
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
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
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