No Couch Is Safe from the CLASH Cloth-Climbing Robot

UC Berkeley's CLASH robot uses tiny little spines to scuttle up loose fabric surfaces faster than you can say "get it off my drapes!"

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No Couch Is Safe from the CLASH Cloth-Climbing Robot

UC Berkeley has a long history of developing innovative legged robots: There was ROACH, there was BOLT, there was DASH. DASH, a cockroach-Inspired design, was a very simple, very fast hexapedal robot that could scuttle along the ground at 15 body lengths per second.

Now meet the latest addition to this family of robot bugs: CLASH, pictured above, is a vertically-enabled successor to DASH, and it's designed to zip up vertical or near-vertical cloth surfaces with the aid of tiny little spiny toes. It's sort of like what you'd get if you put DASH and SpinyBot together in a dark room along with a 3D printer and some Barry Manilow (or whatever it is robots are listening to these days).

For a vertical climbing robot, CLASH is surprisingly quick. It may actually be one of the quickest climbing robots in existence, able to move upwards at 24 centimeters per second, which is really quite a lot faster than it sounds:

Part of the reason that CLASH can scramble around so fast is that it's small and lightweight with a simple, but clever, design. CLASH is 10 centimeters long and weighs only 15 grams. The back-and-forth climbing motion of four legs (the back two are passive) is entirely driven by one single motor that gives CLASH a gait frequency of a brisk 34 strides per second.

The actual gripping and climbing technique is integrated into the beautiful series of linkages that connect CLASH's legs to its motor and to each other, making the mechanism completely passive all the way from initial grip to retraction. The battery and electronics are all onboard, and are located in the tail to help keep the robot balanced.

Next up is to endow CLASH with the ability to turn (which will likely involve the addition of a second actuator somewhere), and modification of the rear legs to allow the robot to scamper along horizontal surfaces too. And while CLASH is currently restricted to climbing things like fabric and carpet that it can sink its claws into, other methods of passive adhesion (like some of that gecko tape) might give CLASH a little extra versatility.

"CLASH: Climbing Vertical Loose Cloth" was presented by P. Birkmeyer, A. G. Gillies, and R. S. Fearing from the University of California, Berkeley, at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in San Francisco last week. Special thanks to Paul Birkmeyer for the CLASH videos, and for forgiving me for mistakenly suggesting that he was at Stanford, not Berkeley, which is just about the worst screw-up I could have possibly made.

[ UC Berkeley's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab ]

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