This wall-climbing robot takes inspiration from snails
Marie Donlon | June 15, 2024Designed to mimic the motion of a snail, the robot has reportedly been outfitted with a sliding suction mechanism — which serves as a substitute for the adhesive properties of the snail’s mucus — that enables it to slide across surfaces using water.
Source: Tianqi Yue
This design, according to the team, allows robots to easily scale walls, potentially paving the way for the development of robots capable of traveling on the surfaces of wind turbine blades, ship hulls, aircraft and glass windows of skyscraper to perform autonomous inspections.
To mimic the critical role of mucus secretion in the snail’s sliding suction mechanism, the team employed water to serve as an inexpensive, easy-to-access and clean artificial mucus to enable the robot to slide while simultaneously maintaining suction.
In the lab, the snail-inspired robot was able to carry a 200 g mass while avoiding obstacles and also demonstrated high loaded sliding ability by carrying a 1 kg mass — which was 10 times heavier than the robot itself.
Further, this mechanism enabled the lightweight robot to slide vertically and upside down, as well as achieve high speeds.
“Through the performance of sliding suction robot, we demonstrated that sliding suction offers low energy consumption, high adhesion efficiency and safety, high loading capacity and low complexity, while only leaving a quick-to-evaporate water trail,” the team added.