The team at Bristol Robotics Laboratory equipped a robot with a sliding suction technology that allowed it to glide on water—a surrogate for a snail’s mucus that doubles as an adhesive.
“The most exciting finding of our research it that the proposed sliding suction mechanism is a novel clean climbing strategy and will significantly advance the development of the next-generation climbing robots,” said Tianqi Yue, the study’s lead author, in a With just one high-payload sucker, snails can glide across a surface steadily, providing future climbing robots with an effective adhesive locomotion mechanism. Mucus secretion, which lowers friction and increases suction, is essential to snails’ sliding suction behavior.
According to researchers, the sliding suction mechanism enables a lightweight robot to move vertically and upside down at high speeds while carrying significant payloads . This method also requires no energy to maintain adhesion.