Servo - June 2010

bots IN BRIEF

FANTASTIC PHOTO OPPS

Robots are designed for tasks that are dull, dirty, or dangerous, right? Well, taking close-ups of African wildlife certainly can fall into that last category, especially when you’re trying to get super close up and personal with big and temperamental animals (like water buffalo or elephants or lions). Solution? Enter a digital single-lens reflex camera and a cute robot with big wheels. Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas built BeetleCam to get a new perspective on African animals. BeetleBot is controlled remotely from a Range Rover about 50 yards away, and has gotten into quite few shenanigans.

The Burrard-Lucas team thought that elephants would be an easy subject for BeetleCam’s first outing. They were wrong because elephants are wary of unfamiliar objects and due to their highly sensitive hearing, they are almost impossible to sneak up on! (And you thought elephants just had good memories.) They soon discovered that the best way to photograph an elephant was to position the camera well in front of it and then let the animal approach it in its own time. With this technique, Will and Matt managed to get some incredible photos of these colossal creatures. Go to

http://blog.burrard-lucas.com/2010/04/adventures-of-beetlecam/

and check them out.

STICKY SITUATION

Meet Stickybot III — a brand new incarnation of Stanford Robotics gecko-inspired climbing robot.

Stickybot III is able to stick to glass by using an adhesive material that mimics gecko feet. Gecko toes are covered in bajillions of microscopic hairs that are so tiny they are attracted to the very molecules in the surface that they’re on. The material is not “sticky” in the normal sense but rather the material is attracted to the surface directly through Van der Waals forces.

The difficulty in getting Stickybot III to actually climb is due in large part to the way the sticky pads are attached to its feet. Gecko feet use a bunch of different pliable layers of the sticky hairs which maximizes the surface area of their feet that makes contact with the surface that they’re trying to stick to. Stickybot III only has a few layers, so if the feet aren’t oriented properly with respect to the surface, a lot of the adhesion is lost. According to Stanford, Stickybot is an embodiment of their hypotheses about the requirements for mobility on vertical surfaces using dry adhesion. The main point is to have a controllable adhesion. Future Spidermen need not apply.