Harvard University engineers partnered with Rolls-Royce to design a robot with sticky feet, which could climb up and down vertical walls and across the ceiling.
The researchers at Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences or SEAS have created these wall-climbing microrobots with a special walking pattern.
Their sticky feet are equipped with electro-adhesive foot pads, origami ankle joints, and specially engineered walking gait allowing it to climb inside complex machines such as a jet engine.
HAMR-E
The new robots are called Harvard Ambulatory Micro-Robot with Electroadhesion or HAMR-E. HAMR-E was based on the lab's existing robot HAMR but it is equipped with foot pads that have greater adhesion. The existing robots can climb vertical surfaces, however, they have problems climbing upside-down and they do not have enough adhesive force that could keep them from falling.
The new microrobots' sticky feet, however, are made up of polyimide-insulated copper electrode, allowing it to produce electrostatic forces between the conductive surface and the foot pads. These foot pads can be easily released and re-engaged by switching the electric field on and off.
The modified wall-climbing robots could be used to inspect and maintain jet engines, generators, and other scientific instruments. The HAMR-E microrobots also have flexible pads, so, it will be able to climb on curved and uneven surfaces, the Harvard engineers described.
Sticky Feet Microrobots
These robots with sticky feet were primarily designed in response to Rolls-Royce's challenge to the Harvard Microrobotics Lab to make micro-robots that can climb inside parts of its jet engines that human workers cannot possibly access.
"Now that these robots can explore in three dimensions instead of just moving back and forth on a flat surface, there's a whole new world that they can move around in and engage with," said lead author of the study Sébastien de Rivaz, a former co-researcher at the Wyss Institute and SEAS who is now working at Apple.
"They could one day enable noninvasive inspection of hard-to-reach areas of large machines, saving companies time and money and making those machines safer."
This new study is co-authored by Benjamin Goldberg, Neel Doshi, Kaushik Jayaram, and Jack Zhou from the Wyss Institute and SEAS It was published in the journal Science Robotics.