Wall Climbing Robot Makes Peeping Toms Happy

Freakin' Sweet! This robot uses some crazy Magneto style voodoo to stick to walls and climb. Not just rough walls, but even walls covered in dust and crap! Not being one to care enough to interpret the sciency wall of words, I'll let this quote explain how this works:

"The as-yet-unnamed robot uses electro-adhesion to cling to the wall, generating electrostatic charges between the wall substrate and itself to keep from falling. "The principle of operation is similar to electrostatic chucks used to hold silicon wafers, or other specialized grippers for robotic handling of materials," senior researcher Harsha Prahlad explained to PM in an email last week. "The technology uses a very small amount of power ... and shows the ability to repeatedly clamp to wall substrates that are heavily covered in dust or other debris."

This is absolutely perfect for the perverted, creepy, staring-in-your-window-at-night miscreant you know. Throw a camera on it, put together a random 30-minute infomercial featuring that Oxi-Clean dude, or better yet the Micro Machines dude, and these guys would make a bajillion dollars. Easy. Hell, I've already put Neon to work reverse engineering one in the Homotron Dungeon right now so we can beat these guys to the punch!

Unmanned Spider-Man? SRI's Wall-Climbing Robot: Exclusive First Look [Popular Mechanics]
[via: Geekologie]