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he European Space Agency (ESA) together with Canadian scientists has designed climbing robots that mimic the stickiness of gecko lizard feet in order to work in space.
In a new technological development, it has been shown that climbing robots that mimic the stickiness of
gecko lizard feet could work in space as well as on Earth, CTV reports. The idea is that hull-crawling automatons could tend to future spacecraft (something similar to the robot in the popular movie Wall-E).
To test out the development, researchers from the ESA, together with scientists from the Simon Fraser University in Canada, subjected gecko-inspired “dry adhesive” materials to space vacuum and temperatures, finding the stickiness is retained throughout. From this finding, engineers from the University’s School of Engineering Science then demonstrated such adhesives work well with a family of “Abigaille” crawling robots.
The inspiration for the robots came from gecko lizards. Here, a gecko’s feet are sticky due to a bunch of little hairs with ends just 100–200 nanometres across – around the scale of individual bacteria. This is sufficiently tiny that atomic interactions between the ends of the hairs and the surface come into play.
The development has been described as a form of "biomimicry," according to a research brief from the ESA.
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