Robert Full: Learning from the Geckos Tail
I’m standing in for Ethan Zuckerman, blogging from TED today. This post is part of a series from the TED 2009 conference held in Long Beach, California from February 4-8th. You can read other posts in the series here, and the TED site will release video from the talk in the coming weeks or months. Because I’m putting these posts together very quickly, I will get things wrong, will misspell names and bungle details. Please feel free to use the comments thread on this post to offer corrections. You may also want to follow the conference via Twitter or through other blogs tagged as TED2009 on Technorati.
Robert Full studies cockroach legs and gecko feet. His research is helping build the perfect “distributed foot” for tomorrow’s robots, based on evolution’s ancient engineering.
He has created “stickybot”, a robot that emulates a gecko using the same mechanisms that normal geckos use. It even has a tail. Why? Well, it turns out that the robot falls off the wall otherwise. It’s tail serves as a fifth leg.
For TED, they have created a special gecko robot with a tail that does automatic air-righting if it falls when hanging upside down. He’s showing some amazing video of this robot, but even more inpressive video of the real geckos being blown around wind tunnels and on glass surfaces for how htey learned this. There’s even a video of a gecko flying through the air, gliding. Using it’s tail to guide its path through the air.
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