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The team, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US,
and the Catholic University of Leuven (CUL), Belgium, looked at how
the cycle of glue breakdown and repair works in natural snail slime.
They also studied synthetic slimes based on clay and polymers, and
calculated the ideal slime properties that climbing robots would need
– and found a wide range of likely candidates, including hair gel and
peanut butter.
Christian Clasen, of CUL, who worked on the study, said: “Who would
have thought that snails could use other soft solids such as
mayonnaise or axle grease as an adhesive lubricant to climb up
vertical walls?”
Co-worker Randy Ewoldt, of MIT, said: “An important result is that
snail mucus per se is not required for robots to climb walls. We can
make our own adhesive locomotion material with commercial products of
harvesting slime from a snail farm.”
Dr Ewoldt has first hand knowledge of the challenges involved in
collecting snail slime.
He said: “I would entice a slug or snail with a piece of lettuce to
crawl across a glass plate, and on the good days it would co-operate
and leave enough of a slime trail for me to collect and test.”
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