Gadgetory

in the quest to build a better climbing robot mechanical engineers at Stanford chose an unusual muse the Gecko we talk to biologists and I said well okay well what animals are out there that are that have really excellent wall climbing abilities and they're fast they're agile and so on gecko stands out they can run at a meter per second up down in any direction they can work on both smooth and rough surfaces grad student Elliott Hawks along with other researchers developed a substance that like gecko feet can easily attach and detach two surfaces repeatedly and it works without magnets or electricity the adhesive is made out of silicon rubber so it's it's not actually sticky it has a cool property that when you just touch touch it to the glass it doesn't feel tacky or sticky at all but when you put your weight on it it then engages the invention led to a superhero moment for hawks these pads equipped with the adhesive and supports for his feet turned hawks his hands into gecko toes letting him scale this 12-foot wall albeit slowly that had been a goal for a couple of years and I was very exciting to get up there and look down all right we did it if we lift it off with a rubber band our band doesn't really even stretch but now we come down here we wrap the rubber band around the loading point and pull the key to the adhesive is a sea of tiny wedges invisible to the human eye this silicone model shows what a single wedge looks like enlarged a hundred times when you bring it into a surface initially they're like so and because it's just the sharp tip of the wedge the contact area is very small so there's no adhesion they're not sticky but now if I apply a shear force they all bend over like this and suddenly the contact area is much larger this microscopic feature gives the adhesive its unique properties but makes it challenging to produce in larger quantities we make this adhesive we make the mold by hand we do micro machining and then we cast the polymer into the mold and we make little little patches you know four by four inches or ten by ten centimeters at a time it's sort of a handcraft NASA is exploring using the adhesive to grab space junk and the CEO of a car company sees the potential to streamline windshield installations they use suction which leaves a big circular suction mark at the end which he then has to a whole nother step to clean afterwards and since ours doesn't leave any residue he was very interested in that but don't cling on to hopes for tapping your inner spider-man Stanford isn't looking to license the technology for any climbing devices in Stanford California I'm suma das cnet.com for CBS News