Glewbot scales buildings like a gecko to inspect wall tiles | Hacker News Reader

Glewbot scales buildings like a gecko to inspect wall tiles

blog.arduino.cc

48 pointsPaulHoule9 comments

To me "Gecko" implies van der Waals forces[1] which this does not use. It just uses suction cups. The only Gecko part is a tail for balance/counter-force.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.192252799

Right. I was expecting this to use the gecko grabbing system developed in Mark Cutkowsky's lab at Stanford. That's about fifteen years old now. Works, but applications have been few.

Suction-based climbing robots are available as commercial products.[1]

The biggest application of climbing robots is cleaning ships' hulls. That uses magnets for adhesion. It's a huge win, since hull-cleaning robots don't require a drydock. Some can even be used on ships under way.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvYTdKBnWdI

It's a great feeling to see a cool robotics project on the front page of Hacker News and realize they used your software (http://edgeimpulse.com) to train the machine learning component!

Congratulations to the authors. Now I better stop reading HN and get back to work :D

Cool bot. I'm guessing there most be some advantages to having a system that climbs the wall instead of descends from a line to justify the extra complexity.

Probably more flexibility? A window cleaning type system only really works for a straight segment of wall, plus if you have a human doing it, it’s potentially dangerous if anything happens to the system during for example a sudden high wind event.

you could use one robot for this, but on a building like the empire state building you would need one for each level's 4+ sides of wall.

This would surely have a safety line if used in real life, no one would want it falling from ten storeys up onto a busy street. So it wouldn't have quite as much freedom of movement as it ha in the lab.

a safety line that can potentially move side to side still is quite a lot more flexibility than just going straight up and down.

also, these things are like the size of an arduino board so i imagine they're cheap to deploy, and easy to replace. plus, if you have a fleet of them, you can probably just have some on standby ready to go, as opposed to a fixed window washing style system.

> easy to replace.

Replacement cost wasn't my concern, it landing at terminal velocity on someone's head was what I worry about.

Gecko Robotics[0] are doing similar things.

[0] https://www.geckorobotics.com/

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