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."

Comments

A new weapon?

[Rendo]

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*

Obligatory

[Ajehals]

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 :)

Re:Obligatory

[Tackhead]

> I for one welcome our van der Waals force utilising Stickybot overlords.

...and I'd like to remind them that as an open-source HTML rendering engine, I could be useful in convincing people to save a bunch of money on their car insurance!

Re:Obligatory

[Em Adespoton]

Just imagine the benefits to burglars, the next invention is going to have to be some very very slippery paint :)

Already invented... you're looking for Fluoroplastic Paint.

Re:Obligatory

[Fred_A]

That new paint would only be applied starting at 10m above the ground though.

Otherwise it wouldn't be much fun.

Flat things do it too

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

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.

Re:The Article. Shocked this is new

[ErikZ]

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!

Re: The Article. Shocked this is new

[Graboid]

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.

Hmmm...

[frosty_tsm]

Could this become part of a Geico commercial?

Utility gecko

[neuro.slug]

Maybe it can climb their server racks to figure out what's causing the burning plastic smell.

Mirrors, anyone?

-- n

video url

[user24]

the site's not loading for me in firefox (it says infinite redirect loop, though it works in *spit* MSIE)
here's the video URL:
http://bdml.stanford.edu/twiki/pub/Main/StickyBot/ Stickybot_040106.mov

Speed

[majaman]

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.

Re:The Article. Shocked this is new

[Oxen]

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.

In other news....

[lottameez]

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.

cool but not cool enough

[ystar]

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.

Re:The Article. Shocked this is new

[SurturZ]

I'd buy one, but I am sure the robo-gecko will be full of bugs.

Bad Plan, what are they thinking?

[JudgeFurious]

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.

Power of the Gecko

[Kelson]

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!

All you need...

[Nineteen.Eleven]

...is a radioactive spider and you too can climb walls.

dusty, sticky feet

[justthisdude]

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.

This works even better than the article says

[Animats]

Cutkowsky has had this technology working for several years now. It's not just for glass; it works on many other building surfaces, too, like concrete walls. It doesn't require a smooth surface. They've had robots climbing up buildings at Stanford for a while now.

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.

At Home Version

[nick_davison]

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.

A common misconception about glass

[dbIII]

I assume you are aware that glass is in fact a liquid at room temp

Not in this room - since I am not on fire. Glass is a glass - a disordered state that could be considered to be similar to an incredibly dense liquid that isn't moving around if you want to use an analogy - but remember it is an analogy. Labelling silicon dioxide dioxide glass as a liquid is an oversimplification possibly used by science teachers talking to young children - in all other situations it is just wrong.

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.

Re:my $0.02 (CDN) (BAD MODS)

[evilviper]

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.

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!

Re:The Article. Shocked this is new

[FirienFirien]

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.