Last weekend your intrepid robotic reporter attended the AAAS Annual Conference. The American Association for The Advancement of Science is the World’s Largest General Scientific Society, focusing on all aspects of scientific research from global warming to linguistics. There was, excitingly enough, a Robotics Symposium, curated by Mr. Robotics, and featuring a wealth of incredibly bright people who do astonishing things with robots.

We’re late for Maker Faire Auditions, so this is going to be in parts. Bear with us!

Bob Full of the UC Berkeley Poly-PEDAL Lab spoke on, among other things, geckos sticking to walls, and demo’d Stickybot and Edubot. Stickybot has gecko toes that enable it to stick very nicely to a pane of glass using nothing but van der waals forces between the glass and the 300 micrometer thick fibrillar adhesive hairs on the bottom of its feet, like real geckos do. Geckos have toe pads with 200 nanometer fibers for sticking and unsticking. The pads on Stickybot are huge by comparison at 300 micrometers, but they still work. The upshot of this research is that we’ll someday have really excellent tape that sticks like a fiend in one direction, doesn’t leave any residue (no liquid adhesive!) and comes off with a touch in the other direction.

As Dr. Full puts it, this is why it’s important to fund curiosity-based research.

It’s also a good case for paying attention to the health of natural systems. We have got to preserve and explore nature’s designs or these secrets will be lost forever.

Full event report by Mr. Robotics is now up here, including more photos and details of all the talks.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 24th, 2007 at 11:41 am and is filed under Neat Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.