share with you today an original discovery but i want to tell it to you the way it really happened not the way i present it in a scientific meeting or the way you'd read it
in a scientific paper it's a story about beyond biomimetics to something i'm calling biomutualism
i define that as an association between biology and another discipline where each discipline reciprocally advances the other but where the collective discoveries that emerge are beyond any single field
now in terms of biomimetics as human technologies take on more of the characteristics of nature nature becomes a much more useful teacher
to climb up a wall so quickly we discovered it and what we found was that
that look like a rug and each of those hairs has the worst case of split ends possible about one hundred to one thousand split ends that are nano size
and i'm really pleased to report to you today that the first synthetic self cleaning dry adhesive has been made
from the simplest version in nature one branch my engineering collaborator ron fearing at berkeley had made the first synthetic version
and so has my other incredible collaborator mark cutkosky at standford he made much larger hairs than the gecko but used the same general principles and here is its first
that's kellar autumn my former ph d student professor now at lewis and clark literally giving his first born child up for this test
more recently this happened
and attached to a safety rope lynn began her sixty foot ascent lynn made it to the top in a perfect pairing of hollywood and science
so you're the first human being to officially emulate a gecko
and what a privilege that has been
to climb up and pull herself up and you can try this in the lobby and look at the gecko inspired material
now the problem with the robots doing this is that they can't get unstuck with the material this is the gecko 's solution they actually peel their toes away from the surface at high rates
as they run up the wall well i'm really excited today to show you the newest version of a robot stickybot using a new hierarchical dry adhesive here is the actual robot
and here is what it does
and if you look
you can see that it uses the toe peeling just like the gecko
some of the video you can see it climbing up
there it is and now it can go on other surfaces because of the new adhesive that the standford group was able to do in designing this incredible robot
one thing i want to point out is look at stickybot you see something on it it's not just to look like a gecko it has a tail
and just when you think you've figured out nature this kind of thing happens the engineers told us for the climbing robots that if they don't have a tail they fall off the wall
so what they did was they asked us an important question they said well
kind of looks like a tail even though we put a passive bar there do animals use their tails when they climb up walls
in reality we were then panicked being the biologists and we should know this already we said well what do tails do well we know that tails store fat
for example we know that you can grab onto things with them and perhaps it is most well known that they provide static balance
it can also act as a counterbalance so watch this kangaroo
see that tail that's incredible marc raibert built a uniroo hopping robot and it was unstable without its tail
now mostly tails limit maneuverability like this human inside this dinosaur suit
my colleagues actually went on to test this limitation by increasing the moment of inertia of a student so they had a tail and running them through and obstacle course and found a decrement in performance like you'd predict
but of course this is a passive tail
talked about the tail being a whip for communication it can also be used in defense
pretty powerful so we then went back and looked at the animal and we ran it up a surface but this time what we did is we put a slippery patch
that you see in yellow there and watch on the right what the animal is doing with its tail when it slips this is slowed down ten times so here is normal speed and watch it now slip and see what it does with its tail
it has an active tail that functions as a fifth leg and it contributes to stability if you make it slip a huge amount this is what we discovered
engineers had a really good idea
and what would happen if they climbed on the underside of that leaf and there was some wind or we
and we did that experiment that you see here
now that's real time you can't see anything but there it is slowed down
so they do it with this active tail as they swing around and then they always land in the sort of superman skydiving posture
okay now we wondered if we were right we should be able to test this in a physical model in a robot so for ted we actually built a robot
over there a prototype with the tail and we're going to attempt the first air righting response in a tail with a robot if we could have the lights on
okay there it goes
there it is
and it works just like it does in the animal so all you need is a swing of the tail to right yourself
now of course we were normally frightened because the animal has no gliding adaptations so we thought oh that's okay we'll put it in a vertical wind tunnel we'll blow the air up
give it a landing target a tree trunk just outside the plexi glass enclosure and see what it does
so we did and here is what it does
it does an equilibrium glide
highly controlled this is sort of incredible but actually it's quite beautiful when you take a picture of
and it's better than that it just in the slide maneuvers in
and then we had to film this several times to believe this it also does this watch this it oscillates its tail up and down like a dolphin it can actually swim through the air
but watch its front legs can you see what they are doing
what does that mean for the origin of flapping flight maybe it's evolved from coming down from trees and trying to control a glide stay tuned for that
so then we wondered can they actually maneuver with this
so there is the landing target could they steer towards it
of animal gliding down there is a red trajectory line look at the end to see the animal but then as it gets closer to the tree look at the close up and see if you can see it land
so there it comes down there is a gecko at the end of that trajectory line you see it there there
watch up there and you can see the landing did you see it hit it actually uses its tail too just like we saw in the lab
so now we can continue this mutualism by suggesting that they can make an active tail
and here is the first active tail in the robot
made by boston dynamics so to conclude
i think we need to build biomutualisms like i showed that will increase the pace of basic discovery in their application to do this though we need to redesign education in a major way to balance depth with interdisciplinary communication and explicitly train people
how to contribute to and benefit from other disciplines and of course you need the organisms and the environment to do it that is whether you care about security search and rescue or health
we must preserve nature 's designs otherwise these secrets will be lost forever and from what i heard from our new president i'm very optimistic thank you
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