Spiderman-like robot creates draglines, scales walls

Switzerland’s Bio-Inspired-Robotics Lab was inspired by spiders. From the way the spindly eight-legged creatures create draglines to how they use their spinnerets to navigate, researchers Liyu Wang, Utku Culha, and Fumiya Lida wanted to create a Spiderman-like robot. The robot they developed shoots an adhesive plastic substance from its wrist that can attach to any surface. This enables the robot to move along the dragline that it has created, and to produce more lines if needed. With this technology, robots would catapult themselves from a surface to midair without flying.

This method of movement is beneficial for robots who approach unexpected terrains or environments as they can alter their paths of movement accordingly. As published in an issue of Bioinspiration & Biometrics , the team of researchers vividly described how this robotic technology could potentially alter how robots will be created in the future.

The spider-esque robot is approximately three times larger than an actual spider. Composed of metal, wires, and installed batteries, the robot has run smoothly through various tests. The dragline material functions like a glue stick in a hot glue gun; sticks of thermoplastic adhesive (TPA) are onboard, and when the robot is ready to make a dragline, the solid stick of TPA is pushed into a heated vicinity and melted out through a nozzle. The two wheels outside the nozzle help direct the stream of the dragline. The lines of TPA produced can vary from 1 to 5 mm in thickness.

When the dragline is all set, the robot is free to traverse along the lines. Like spiders, the robots function in a controlled and methodological way. Since spiders use a fourth pair of legs to move about, the robot requires the two wheels to propel itself down the dragline. At an average speed of 5 cm/min, the robots descended distances up to 82 cm. The only traveling limitation is posed when the dragline material has been depleted. The team is working on a way for the robot to retrieve and reuse the material.

In the future, the researchers will program the robot to move in grid-like patters, moving both horizontally and vertically. The robots will also eventually be able to move between the draglines and solid surfaces, just like real spiders.

Story via Phys.org