Wall-, Ceiling-Climbing Robot With Supersonic Air Jet Grippers

Using carefully designed and machined grippers, this prototype ‘bot from researchers Matthew Journee, XiaoQi Chen, James Robertson, Mark Jermy, and Mathieu Sellier can climb wooden, metal, and cloth surfaces with ease. Rough textures and small gaps in the substrate apparently present no problem, and the video includes impressive footage of the machine dragging an additional half-kilo weight up a wooden door and rolling around upside-down on a ceiling made of glass. The in-press paper was presented at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. [via Popular Science]