Gecko Gripper blasts off to help design space- crawling robots

In a few years, the exterior of the International
Space Station could be crawling with geckos.
It’s not an alien invasion, or the plot of a low-
budget sci-fi movie. The robotic geckos could follow
from an experiment NASA launched to the
International Space Station on Tuesday aboard an
uncrewed Cygnus spacecraft .

The Gecko Gripper devices use tiny artificial hairs
that replicate the ones geckos use to climb walls .
They are designed to help astronauts to keep track
of objects in zero gravity, and enable robots to
crawl around a spacecraft to inspect and repair it.

The bots have already been tested on parabolic
aircraft flights, where they grabbed and
manipulated 10-kilogram and 100-kg objects during
20-second periods of microgravity. On the ISS trip,
astronauts will test the system by attaching it to
surfaces inside the space station. They will attach
five devices in a range of sizes to 30 surfaces at
different angles to check how well they grip. The
devices will be left in place anywhere from two
weeks to a year.

“Geckos are nature’s most amazing climbers,” says
lead researcher Aaron Parness of NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in California. “They go from
the floor to the ceiling in 2 seconds. And they can
stick to almost anything.”

Geckos feet are not sticky to the touch, but
instead use millions of tiny hairs that grip surfaces
using charged van der Waals forces . Such hairs
give the Gecko Gripper an advantage over the
Velcro astronauts now use to secure objects.
Parness also imagines more ambitious purposes. “We
can grab satellites to repair them, service them,”
he says. “We can also grab space garbage and try
and clear it out of the way. We’re interested
here in making robots that could crawl around on
the outside of say, the space station, do repair, do
inspection.”