Wall-crawling gecko robots can stick in space too

2 January 2014 - Climbing robots that mimic the stickiness of gecko lizard feet could work in space as well as on Earth, ESA has shown, raising the prospect of hull-crawling automatons tending future spacecraft. Robots crawling across spacecraft surfaces are a common sight in science fiction films from Silent Running to Wall-E . But, in reality, how might they stick in place while still remaining mobile? Researchers from ESA and Simon Fraser University in Canada subjected gecko-inspired 'dry adhesive' materials to space vacuum and temperatures, finding the stickiness is retained throughout. Engineers from the University's School of Engineering Science have demonstrated such adhesives with a family of 'Abigaille' crawling robots. "This approach is an example of 'biomimicry', taking engineering solutions from the natural world," explained Michael Henrey of Simon Fraser University. 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.