So while I’ve been reflecting over the game and how we manipulate the game pieces, I began thinking about how our team had trouble with getting cones due to lack of traction. This made me think of a video by Veritasium where he looks at artificial gecko skin, which sticks to stuff in a very cool way. What I was wondering is if anyone thinks they would use it if it ever became an FRC legal off the shelf item. It’s very interesting science and regardless of whether or not you would use it, I thought I would show it to people because of how cool it is.
I have some of their glasses nosepads and they work quite well. Haven’t tried on a cone. We tried CatTongue tape from Amazon and it was actually too sticky for our clamping claw design, where it’d stick so well to one side that the cone wouldn’t drop in the center.
As far as I know this isn’t even commercial yet (at least it wasn’t a few years ago, I might not be up to date), so I wouldn’t expect to see it in FRC any time soon. Besides, these products will probably be very expensive as they require advanced and uncommon manufacturing processes.
We used a material called “snakeskin” for our manipulator. It is conveyor belt material and is super grippy. We also put it on the bottom of our robot to hold the robot in place when we drive off the edge of the charge station. Once on the snakeskin, the robot doesn’t move. Like, at all. Amazing stuff!
We looked it up, and while the company was willing to send us a very small sample, as it’s not for sale it would not be FRCFIRST Robotics Competition legal this year.
This stuff has been in development since I was in high school (2009). Stanford recently spun off a startup dedicated specifically to it, so that’s a good sign for a commercial scale production path, but I’d expect a few years before they actually get to that.
They do have a very interesting partnership with Flexiv for high dexterity / high grip / low pressure end of arm tooling for fine assembly, but both companies are still fighting to find their “killer app” that’ll support charging a high enough price to get livable production margins.
