Could snail-based climbing robots be on the way up?
A new snail-based sliding suction method improves climbing robot journeys. What uses could it find in the wider world?
Researchers at the UK’s University of Bristol have developed a new method by which robots can climb vertical surfaces.
They’re borrowing a biotechnological trick from, of all creatures, snails to formulate their new method.
Climbing robots are popular in industries like structural inspection and cleaning, where it would be potentially hazardous to send human beings to do the job.
But climbing robots suffer from a general clunkiness in their motion, especially when it comes to adhering to surfaces.
That’s because a lot of the climbing robots currently in use prefer a “walking” motion, but that’s precisely as awkward as it sounds when faced with vertical surfaces. “Walking” up a vertical surface usually involves legs with suckers or adhesion points. That in turn means putting them down and lifting them up (breaking adhesion) with every forward, or rather upward, step.
Snails, on the other hand, use slime to maintain adhesion through a sliding suction. The result is a much smoother ascent and descent. Not by any means a faster one, but very much smoother.
The Bristol research team is using a rapidly-evaporating water-based substitute for snail-slime to transport its small but effective robots, and in tests, the team found that the robots could transport a payload of 2.2 pounds (around 1 kilogram) – amounting to a weight some ten times their own – using the water-slime adhesion method.
The researchers claim they’ve proven that sliding suction offers low energy consumption, high adhesion efficiency and safety, high loading capacity – but their work is not over yet.
Currently, the snail-slime sliding suction method is only effective on perfectly flat surfaces.
That might work on internal walls, but most exterior surfaces will give the snailbots trouble. Rough surfaces lead to slime leakage, and more energy expended in trying to maintain adhesion.
So there’s already talk of future versions of the sliding suction method being adapted with the likes of a suction pump to keep adhesion at the right levels, and adding more suction cups to allow the snailbots to get over the likes of lips and sills.
One thing’s for certain, though – the snailbots are going places. And they’re going on slime.
