Spiderman robot spins draglines to cross open space

Spider-inspired robots carrying payloads descend on their draglines. 

Credit: Wang, et al. ©2014 IOP Publishing Ltd

Inspired by spiders' abilities to produce draglines and use them to move across open space, researchers have designed and built a robot that can do the same.

Similar to Spiderman shooting a dragline from his wrist, the robot produces a sticky plastic thread that it attaches to a surface, such as a wall or tree branch.

Then the robot descends the dragline, while simultaneously continuing to produce as much line as needed.

The mechanism could enable robots to move from any solid surface into open space without the need for flying.

The researchers, Liyu Wang, Utku Culha, and Fumiya Iida, at the Bio-Inspired Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, have published a paper on the spider-inspired robot in a recent issue of Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.

"The dragline-forming robot is interesting because it implements a new concept: that a robot may accomplish a task by building structures to assist it," Wang told reporters.

"It is advantageous because the robot can flexibly vary the structure (in this case, the thickness of the dragline) according to environments or tasks that cannot be anticipated."


At first glance, the robot doesn't look much like a spider, since it is about 3 times larger and made of an assortment of metal, wires, and onboard batteries.

The source of its dragline material is a stick of thermoplastic adhesive (TPA), which functions similarly to a glue stick in a hot glue gun.

When the robot is ready to produce a dragline, the solid TPA stick is pushed through a heating cavity and out of a nozzle.

Two wheels located just beyond the nozzle help elongate and guide the dragline in the desired direction. The robot can form draglines with a thickness varying from 1 to 5 mm.

Since the hot TPA dragline is sticky, it can adhere to the solid surface from where the robot starts its journey into open space.

Once the dragline is stuck on the surface, the robot can begin descending down the dragline while producing more of it, mimicking the way that spiders fall down their draglines in a controlled way.

While spiders use a fourth pair of legs to move down their draglines, the robot relies on its two wheels for locomotion down the dragline.

More information: Liyu Wang, et al. "A dragline-forming mobile robot inspired by spiders." Bioinspir. Biomim. 9 (2014) 016006 (10pp). DOI: 10.1088/1748-3182/9/1/016006

James Webb Space Telescope: Spinning the Webb - Video

NASA is spinning a "Webb," and it is not about a spider, it's about a part of the James Webb Space Telescope that is being "spin-tested" in a centrifuge to prove it can withstand the rigors of space travel.

This video, called "Spinning a Webb," is part of an ongoing video series about the Webb telescope. The series, called "Behind the Webb," is produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., and takes viewers behind the scenes with engineers as they test the Webb telescope's components.

In the video institute host Mary Estacion takes the viewer to the giant centrifuge chamber at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., where the telescope's Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM) was tested in an environment to simulate the acceleration forces it will endure during launch.

The instrument module, known as ISIM, is one of three major elements that make up the Webb telescope flight system.

ISIM will house Webb's four main instruments, which will detect light from distant stars and galaxies, and planets orbiting other stars.

Basically, the structure provides support for Webb's cameras and other instruments.

Estacion interviewed Bill Chambers, centrifuge project engineer at NASA Goddard, who explains why the center has the world's largest centrifuge.

Goddard's 140-foot-diameter centrifuge can accelerate a 2.5-ton payload up to 30 g, that is, 30 times Earth's normal gravity—well beyond the force experienced in a launch.

The most intense roller-coasters in the world top out at about 5 g, and then only for brief moments. The Webb equipment can experience between 6 g and 7 g because of vibration.

In the video, Estacion also talked with Eric Johnson, ISIM structure manager at NASA Goddard, about why the centrifuge was used and the stresses the machine will impose on the instrument module.

Johnson explained that the module was tested at seven times Earth's gravity to simulate the pull it will experience during launch, "and then when it gets to zero g way out in space, we have to show that it's the same shape as it was here on Earth."

Usually in centrifuge testing, engineers run the tests a little beyond actual environment conditions. They take the structural loading conditions that they expect to see during launch and then raise them by 25 percent.

Instruments should be able to handle actual conditions if they can survive the increased, simulated experience.

Two 1,250-horsepower motors power the centrifuge, which can spin up to 156 mph, more than 30 rotations per minute.

Black hole Discovered to be spinning Close to the relativistic limit

A composite X-ray image of the galaxy NGC1365 taken by NuSTAR and XMM-Newton.

Courtesy: Guido Risaliti

The best evidence yet that some supermassive black holes (SMBH) rotate at extremely high rates has been found by an international team of astronomers.

Made using the recently launched NuStar space telescope, the study suggests that a huge black hole at the centre of a distant galaxy acquired a huge amount of rotational energy as it formed.

The discovery could provide important information about how SMBHs and their associated galaxies form and evolve.

Astronomers know that black holes that are as large as a billion solar masses can be found at the heart of most galaxies.

Because these gravitational behemoths are created at the same time as their host galaxies, understanding how they formed could provide important information about galaxy formation and evolution.

Knowing the spin of an SMBH can provide important clues about how it formed. If the black hole grew slowly, by sucking in small amounts of matter from all directions, then it isn't expected to have much spin.

However, if the formation process involves the black hole gorging rapidly on matter from a specific direction, conservation of angular momentum would leave it with an extremely large spin.

Redshifted X-rays
The spin of a supermassive black hole can be measured by looking at the effect that the spin has on material that is being sucked in to the black hole.

This material forms an accretion disc that swirls around the black hole before disappearing from sight. The faster the black hole is spinning, the closer the inner edge of the disc is to the centre of the black hole.

As a result, the X-rays emanating from the inner edge are affected by the black hole's gravity more when the black hole is spinning.

Astronomers see this as a "stretching" of the wavelength (redshift) of characteristic X-rays emanating from iron and other elements in the accretion disc. By measuring the redshift, the spin of the black hole can be deduced.

The problem, however, is that these X-rays must first travel through fast-moving clouds of gas that surround the accretion disc.

The absorption of X-rays by the gas could mimic the effect of a spinning black hole. As a result, astronomers have not been that confident about their estimates of black-hole spin.