Your Friendly Neighborhood SpiderBot

Posted 25 Aug 2009 at 19:09 UTC by steve

An interesting video from the Ben Gurion University Deparment of Mechanical Engineering Robotics Lab turned up on YouTube today. It shows an "underconstrained cable suspended robot capable of maneuvering from one stance space to another by clinging to new contact points." The robot actually shoots "webs" like Spiderman that adhere to surfaces and allow the robot to move around while suspended. There's not a lot of information to be found but what we do know is that the researchers are interested in motion planning. Among the researchers credited in the video are Dr. Amir Shapiro, Alon Capua, Yoav Tov, and Nati Michaeli. If anybody has a link to the juicy technical details on this bot, please post it in a comment, we'd love to know more.