I think all that's left to say is that I, for one, welcome our new wall climbing robotic tank overlords. ;)
Behold: The Gecko-robot wall-climbing tank!
Boffins have taken their inspiration from the gecko to develop a tank robot that can scale completely smooth walls and shuffle along ceilings. Researchers from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, looked at the little sticky pads on the toes of geckos and recreated the van der Waals forces - very weak, …
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Tuesday 1st November 2011 19:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Wonderful
How do they get it off once it's stuck on? Can it be scaled up? I'd like to see one with a chair for use as a stair lift for the elderly you could deploy them quickly to create temporary elderly care homes though getting the daredevil pensioners back to ground child be tricky, bugger free climbing my father'd be scaling any glass building he could find.
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Tuesday 1st November 2011 20:57 GMT Peter2
I'm not certain that it's that good yet. A couple of points in the video appeared to show someone holding his hands underneath it in case it fell off.
I would expect that it's right at the limit for the weight it can hold at the moment. Given, that performance is pretty impressive but I suspect that real world applications are a long way off.
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