Wall-Climbing Device to Scale Any Surface

ByABC News
May 17, 2001, 3:01 PM

May 18 -- Spiderman won't be the only one who can do whatever a spider can including scale shear walls thanks to a German engineer's invention that puts vertical-climbing skills in the hands of humans.

By attaching four disc-shaped suckers of the so-called Gekkomat to hands and feet, a person can slither up a vertical surface of any texture. The device, developed by German engineer Gerald Winkler, may not be the first wall-climbing gizmo to appear in patent books, but it may be the most versatile.

Other suction-based devices that allowed people to become wall-climbers only worked on super-smooth surfaces, such as glass. The Gekkomat is billed as capable of clinging to even porous materials such as plaster and concrete and can grip up to a ton of weight.

"The principle of adherence is vacuum and friction," explained Winkler.

Winkler says his device, which means "automatic lizard-climber" in German, took its inspiration from the gecko, the wall-climbing lizard that can generate up to 90 pounds of gripping strength.

Grips Like a Frog

To use the Gekkomat, a person wears two tanks of compressed air strapped to his or her back. The air is circulated behind specially designed nozzles to create a powerful vacuum.

A combination of the suction and friction between one disc of the Gekkomat and the wall's surface creates a grip capable of holding up to 550 pounds. Once a person moves a suction cup to a new spot on the wall, a line of red and green LEDs signals when the disc is ready to grip. Two tanks of compressed air will let a person scuttle around a wall for up to two hours.

A recent demonstration by a stuntman hired by the British Broadcasting Corp. proved the device was effective, albeit cumbersome the unit weighs 66 pounds altogether, the BBC reported.

Although the Gekkomat gets its name from the lizard, its adhesive power works more like the suction created by the sticky toes and pads on tree frogs' feet. Geckos use a phenomenon called Van der Waal's forces extremely weak attractions between molecules to gain grip. When the billions of tiny spatulae on a gecko's toes each generate these weak forces, the cumulative grip becomes powerful.