Now, from the Boston Museum of Science, Si-tech Today, on NECN.

You've heard art imitating life, but how about technology imitating biology? Joining us now from the Museum of Science Boston is Casey Kute from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.Hi, Casey.Hi, how are you?

Good, good to have you with us. So, you're looking to biology to design robots, and what specifically have you come up with?

So, if you look at nature, you'll see really unique abilities. One of them is the gecko, which is a small lizard that's able to climb on smooth surfaces. So, we want to go and figure out how it is doing that. And take that the same ability, and those principles, and use them on some of the robots that we have and one of them is Folbar, which I have here. And it actually uses a flat tacky elastomer which is our first step before beginning the synthetic gecko fibers.

And how does the gecko do what he does?

So, the gecko has tiny hairs on the feet, and each one of those hairs can get really close contact with the wall. And the forces between the molecules, and both the fibers and the wall come together under what are called intermolecular forces, more specifically the Van der Waals Forces. And so if you get thousands of those tiny hairs really close to each other, you can actually get a significant amount of force.

And what do you use to make the robot mimic how the gecko moves?

So we use a polymer material and molded some of these fibers, put them on one of our robots called Wallbot and it actually can climb on really smooth surfaces. One of the problems that you have is that the adhesion between the fibers and the wall is really strong which is great for climbing. But when you want it to move, you've got to figure out the way to move it. So, we actually peel from the surface, and in the same way that the gecko peels its tones off.

And so we are looking at some videos here, this is Wallbot.

Yes, absolutely.

So it moves up the wall.

Yap, and so you'll see as the feet are coming off—it peels. This is slightly different from the gecko ,because the gecko actually has really soft toes and it peels back, and we are using more rigid surfaces. But it has the same principles behind all the biological things.

Pretty cool, what are some of the applications for this new technology?

So one of the things that we want to do is to take this really small robots and put them in such places where we could do surveilance and video monitoring. You can put different payloads into sensors and temperature monitor and all kinds of these things and moves the sensors around, which is really unique expect.

All right they are there on display in the museum of science.

Yeah, they are. Come by and see them.

All right, Casey Kute. Thanks so much for joining us this morning.

Thanks for having me.

And you'll be sure to join us every Thursday morning at this time for Si-tech Today or log on the museum of science website mos.org.