It weighs 240 grams and uses the van der Walls forces to walk on vertical surfacesAt Simon Fraser University, California, has developed a small robot, weighing 240 grams, able to climb vertical surfaces along 3.4 cm per second. It 'been dubbed the robot gecko, just because technology makes it possible to take inspiration from the sticky fingers of pets.
The platform or TBCP Climbing Belt Timeless-II has a number of possible technical applications, such as ducts and pipes in the inspection of buildings, aircraft or nuclear power plants and has been explained by Jeff Krahn, one of the authors of the research, the journal Smart Materials and Structures.
The ability to "walk" of geckos on vertical surfaces is due to the structure of their fingers, sticky but dry, which use the van der Walls forces, weak attractive forces that molecules exert very close to each other. The researchers at Simon Fraser have the same structure reconstructed in the laboratory, using the pads polymethylsiloxane, PDMS, known as fibrillar adhesives. The stickers have been assembled in such a way as to form lumps of mushrooms or 17 micrometers wide and 10 micrometers in height. The van der Walls forces, however weak, can be fully exploited due to the structure of the mushroom-bearing adhering perfectly to the vertical surface by virtue of their flexibility.
The autonomy of TBCP-II is satisfactory even on large objects, but the researchers aim to make it completely independent.