This Gecko-Inspired Robotic Gripper Could Clean Up the Millions of Pieces of Junk Floating in Space

“We think gecko-inspired adhesives are a technology that can assist and augment the capabilities of astronauts, whether it be being able to pick up tools or record live astronaut activities,” says Abhishek Cauligi (Credit: Getty Images)

The Astrobee, a gecko-adhesive gripper, could be a cleaning robot for the future

Collecting floating debris in space

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), in April 2021, there were 128 million pieces of space debris greater than 1 mm up to 1 cm floating in space.

In 2017, Engineers from Stanford University created a prototype robotic gripper that could potentially be used to collect floating debris in space or service a satellite.

On April 9 and 15, 2021, the robotic gecko gripper – inspired by the sticky feet of a gecko – was tested on the International Space Station (ISS) by NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, Ph.D. with the robot Astrobee.

The gecko gripper is a mechanical attachment for a robot that can grasp surfaces using adhesive inspired by the pads of a gecko’s feet. The technology could be especially useful in space because the gecko adhesive doesn’t require any force to attach to a surface.

For the test on the ISS, researchers from the Autonomous Systems Lab set up a ground station in Pavone’s lab at Stanford to communicate with NASA. Researchers watched the astronauts inspect the gripper and run the experiments with a live video feed. Two of the experiments performed on the ISS were to manually attach the gecko gripper to a surface on the ISS to measure the strength of the hold and make Astrobee fly over and attach itself to a wall by using only the gecko gripper. Both tests were successful.

“The texture of it is too fine to see, but if you were to look at it under a microscope, you would see a forest of little tiny, sharp wedges,” says Mark Cutkosky, professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University, whose lab co-developed the gripper with the professor of aeronautics and astronautics Marco Pavone.

“Like the actual gecko itself, most of the time it’s not sticky. But when you pull in just the right direction it grabs and it grabs pretty hard. So that gives us a controllable adhesive.”

Geckos are helping NASA clean up space garbage

This success is just the first stage in a three-phase plan of experiments to showcase the use of gecko-inspired adhesives in a variety of space-based applications focused on the eventual goal of cleaning up space, Pavone says.

“Now that we have mastered this capability we can move to the next phase,” he says, explaining that next they hope to add a perception capability to Astrobee so the robot can autonomously figure out where and how to attach itself to the wall.

After that, “The next big move would be to do all of that but outside of the International Space Station in the very harsh environment of space.”

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