The robot invasion is nowhere close to over. Singularity Hub has reported on a multitude of autonomous machines (the autonomous forklift, KIVA, Asimo) that may one day force honest, hardworking people to the unemployment lines. Maybe it’s not a big deal if Mom and Dad are out of jobs, but when Spider-Man is made redundant, well, that’s just not cool.
Yes, the folks over at Stanford have (with the help of Carnegie Melon, UPenn, and Boston Dynamics) created RiSE, a robot designed specifically to scale walls. RiSE is a six-legged machine that uses two different nature-inspired technologies to hang from vertical surfaces. The key to RiSE’s gravity defying success is in its feet. Each foot contains a directional adhesive that uses Van der Waals molecular forces to stick to the surface as well as an array of tiny micro-spines that act as hooks and grab onto small surface defects on the wall.
RiSE’s climbing action is a combination of two different Stanford robot technologies. The adhesive property was borrowed from StickyBot, a robot modeled after the wall-climbing abilities of the gecko, while the spine action was adapted from a robot named, you guessed it, SpinyBot. SpinyBot was designed to mimic the way that insects, most notably spiders and cockroaches, ascend vertical surfaces. In RiSE, the combination of these two technologies offers a superior stick, allowing the robot to carry a payload equal to its own weight.
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