Robot Climbs Walls

An engineer looks to nature to make robots that slither through pipes and climb walls

Robot researcher Amir Shapiro builds snakelike robots (like the one draped around his neck) that can twist like screws. He also makes robots that scale walls by releasing tiny amounts of glue, much as a snail leaves a trail of mucus.

These three-dimensional snakes have two sets of motors that give us two traveling wave motions, in the vertical and horizontal directions," says Shapiro, who heads the robotics lab in the mechanical engineering department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beersheba, Israel. "We combined the two perpendicular traveling waves for a screwlike motion that moves the snakebot forward. So it's going forward and around at the same time." This lets it wriggle through small holes and pipes, a trick that could help workers find and rescue people buried under collapsed buildings.

IEEE Spectrum