Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Daily News
March 23, 2008 By Rich Schapiro, Daily News Staff Writer
ONE DAY in the not-too-distant future, the Defense Department may dispatch a team of the country’s most sophisticated spies to an enemy nation.
The secret agents won’t speak several languages or be masters of disguise.
And they won’t even walk on two legs.
They’ll be robotic lizards — geckos, to be exact — that are able to climb walls and remain perched for days, covertly surveilling the terrain below with little risk of detection.
Stickybots, the name given to the 2-foot-long robots, were designed using the same principles that enable real geckos to scamper up and down trees with extraordinary efficiency.
“I’m trying to get robots to go places where they’ve never gone before,” the robot’s creator, Mark Cutkosky, told National Geographic in its upcoming issue.
The development of the robots, which use adhesive toes and an agile tail to scale walls, just like a gecko, is funded by the Department of Defense’s advanced research projects program.
Cutkosky’s team at Stanford University began working on a machine based on the agile lizards because of their superior climbing prowess.
He observed that the geckos’ scaling ability is largely due to the millions of tiny hairs on the bottom of each of the reptile’s toes.
The robots he created have synthetic fibers on their feet that provide an adhesive that enables the Stickybots to climb at a speed of 4 centimeters per second.
Cutkosky says the mechanical lizards could one day also aid in rescue operations and planetary exploration.
March 23, 2008 By Rich Schapiro, Daily News Staff Writer
ONE DAY in the not-too-distant future, the Defense Department may dispatch a team of the country’s most sophisticated spies to an enemy nation.
The secret agents won’t speak several languages or be masters of disguise.
And they won’t even walk on two legs.
They’ll be robotic lizards — geckos, to be exact — that are able to climb walls and remain perched for days, covertly surveilling the terrain below with little risk of detection.
Stickybots, the name given to the 2-foot-long robots, were designed using the same principles that enable real geckos to scamper up and down trees with extraordinary efficiency.
“I’m trying to get robots to go places where they’ve never gone before,” the robot’s creator, Mark Cutkosky, told National Geographic in its upcoming issue.
The development of the robots, which use adhesive toes and an agile tail to scale walls, just like a gecko, is funded by the Department of Defense’s advanced research projects program.
Cutkosky’s team at Stanford University began working on a machine based on the agile lizards because of their superior climbing prowess.
He observed that the geckos’ scaling ability is largely due to the millions of tiny hairs on the bottom of each of the reptile’s toes.
The robots he created have synthetic fibers on their feet that provide an adhesive that enables the Stickybots to climb at a speed of 4 centimeters per second.
Cutkosky says the mechanical lizards could one day also aid in rescue operations and planetary exploration.