Snail robot excretes sticky mucus that helps it crawl up slopes

A mucus-excreting robot with a single massive foot can successfully imitate the best way snails crawl over surfaces – even steeply inclined ones.

“I always say that snails are like Michael Jackson to me. You don’t see how they move, but somehow gliding is happening,” mentioned Saravana Prashanth Murali Babu on the University of Southern Denmark throughout a presentation on the American Physical Society’s March Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on 4 March.

Fascinated by the shelled molluscs, Saravana and his colleagues determined to construct a model of a snail’s single massive, delicate foot and use it as the idea of a robot that strikes like a snail.

During his presentation, Saravana defined that the group selected to construct the foot from a delicate materials that might be inflated in segments by small pneumatic pumps. He says that whereas the chemical properties of snail mucus have beforehand been studied intimately, the best way the snail’s foot strikes had solely been hypothesised based mostly on biologists’ observations. These previous research proposed that completely different elements of a snail’s foot hit the bottom, then detach from it earlier than hitting it once more, they usually achieve this out of sync with one another. This creates a wave type throughout the foot that lets the snail glide ahead on its mucus.

The researchers replicated this “pedal wave” movement of their experimental robot, which may additionally excrete mucus, and noticed it efficiently transfer ahead and make turns with out falling over. It even managed to maneuver up steeply inclined surfaces in some experiments, says Saravana.

Although the bot remains to be on the experimental stage, Saravana hopes that it will turn into the primary ever robot that propels itself like a snail. To make it extra self-contained, the group is experimenting with placing the pumps in a snail-like shell on high of the robot. The shell – a barely outsized plastic duplicate of an actual snail shell – may also home electronics for remotely controlling the robot, and a syringe system for releasing mucus beneath the robotic foot, mimicking an actual snail’s slimy path.

The group’s remaining objective, nonetheless, is to make the robot’s inflatable foot even softer and extra much like actual snails, whose our bodies are largely product of water. The researchers hope that a robot that efficiently strikes on mucus may inform the design of soppy medical robots that may finally transfer contained in the human physique the place mucus can be ample.