The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: May 25, 2008

Official News page 6


REAL LIFE NEWS: LOOK OUT FOR GECKO-BOT

by Hazed

Scientists have long been fascinated by the way geckoes manage to climb up walls and crawl across ceilings without falling, thanks to their sticky little feet. Now a California-based researcher says he's come up with technology that uses "electro-adhesion" and will allow robots to do the same thing. The research and development group SRI reckons this new switchable stickiness technology will have application for military and disaster relief applications.

Not to mention cat burglars and crime fighting spider-people!

Dr Harsha Prahlad was due to announce his scuttling wallcrawling robots in Pasadena at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The gecko-bots use "compliant pads" which mould themselves to a surface and then induce electrical charges in it, which allows the pad's electrodes to suck themselves firmly against the induced surface charges. It works well on wood, concrete, brick, glass or steel, which more or less covers things modern buildings are made of.

Before you start planning your very own spiderman suit, although in theory the tech could be scaled up to human-weight applications, that's not going to happen for a while. Right now it only works on little robots. But there's many uses it could be put to even at its small size: robotic window cleaners, droid painters, self-positioning radio-net node droids... the possibilities are endless!


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