Walking inverted on ceilings with wheel-legs and micro-structured adhesives

Gecko-inspired structured adhesives will be valuable for novel climbing and space robots. Robots also provide useful evaluation platforms for these adhesives. Climbing robots need to be lightweight, and thus many designs use multiple feet on a single rotating wheel-leg. Generally, such designs have not been able to walk robustly on steeper than vertical substrates. In this work, we use an improved version of our previous Mushroom-Shaped Adhesive MicroStructured (MSAMS) tape to support a power-autonomous robot reliably walking inverted on glass ceilings. The resulting speeds are greater than one body/length per second, faster than other adhesion-based climbing prototypes. The printed robot design is also a contribution toward future robotic designs and will have future applications in testing new adhesives for robotic feet.