This Wall-Crawling Gecko Robot May Fly in Space One Day Meet Abigaille: a six-legged gecko-inspired robot that may one day climb walls in space. The wall-crawling gecko robot is still in its experimental phase, but its creators hope Abigaille will give rise to automatons that can dexterously crawl around the hull of a spaceship. Engineers from Canada and the European Space Agency looked to geckos to make adhesive robot feet that wouldnt shed their sticking power in the harsh vacuum of space. This approach is an example of biomimicry, taking engineering solutions from the natural world, Michael Henrey of Canadas Simon Fraser University said in a statement. Henrey and colleagues made footpad terminators for Abigaille modeled after the thin fibers that give rise to the geckos impressive grip. Abigaille apparently was put through her paces at ESAs Electrical Materials and Process Labs in the Netherlands and even tested in a vacuum chamber. So far, the robot is limited to relatively smooth man-made surfaces, ESA officials said, but the researchers are working on improving the gecko-bots performance. For the complete article, heres the link bit.ly/1efyiZh Hera Indigo League Elites The first photo is a close-up of one of the Abigaille wall-crawler robots six feet, which has six degrees of freedom for agile climbing and dry adhesives on its footpad to keep it stuck to surfaces. The second photo shows a microscopic view of the mushroom-shaped footpad terminators on wall-crawling robots. The footpads are inspired by geckos and are made using techniques from the microelectronics industry.
Posted on: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 07:50:12 +0000
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