Dr. Amir Shapiro

The PhysOrg article Robots climb up the wall said

A robotics scientist from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheeba, Israel, has developed four different kinds of robots that climb up walls.
 
The latest projects of Amir Shapiro, head of the robotics laboratory in the Department of Engineering, are wall-climbers, two of which are inspired by animals that climb. One robot, inspired by snails and their trails of mucus, secretes a tiny trail of hot melted glue that allows it to stick to walls as it climbs, while another, inspired by cats and rodents, has four legs with claws made of fish hooks to help it climb rough surfaces.
 
A third robot in the collection is a wheeled robot with 3M sticky tape on the wheels to enable it to climb up smooth surfaces such as glass or a whiteboard. The fourth is magnetic and can climb smooth metal surfaces, which may make it useful for clambering around the submerged hulls of cargo ships to check for contraband and bombs, and replacing divers who now do this work. Shapiro said that a good scanning algorithm could make the robot very efficient for this purpose.

Amir Shapiro, Ph.D. is Lecturer, Head of the Robotics Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel where he focuses on locomotion of multi-limbed mechanisms in unstructured complex environments.
 
Amir’s research interests include: Navigation Algorithms for multi-limbed robots, Non-Linear control algorithms for multi-limbed robots, Robot grasping design, control, and stability analysis, Locomotion of snake-like robots, Climbing of snake-like robots, Design of special robotics structures, Multi-Robot online motion planning, and Medical robotics.
 
He authored The Future is Here — Making Walking Machines: Planar Spider Robot (Hebrew) and Stability of second-Order Asymmetric Linear Systems With Application to Robot Grasping, and coauthored Design of a Quadruped Robot for Motion with Quasistatic Force Constraints, Immobilization Based Control of Spider Robots in Tunnels Environment, PCG: A Foothold Selection Algorithm for Spider Robot Locomotion in 2D Tunnels, and Frictional Compliance Model Development and Experiments for Snake Robot Climbing. Read the full list of his publications!
 
Amir earned his MSc in Mechanical Engineering. with the thesis “Design and Control of a Planar Spider Robot” at Technion, Israel in 1999 and his Ph.D. with the thesis Design and Control of an Autonomous Spider-Like Robot for Motion in 2D Tunnels Environments at Technion, Israel in 2003.
 
Watch SpiderBot – The Final Movie, Wall Climbing Robots developed at Ben Gurion University, Big Ben — Ben-Gurion Robot, and Technion’s Robocup robot. Visit his Facebook page. Read A Word With the Inventor of the Battlefield Snakebot and the Wall-Scaling Snailbot and Don’t Look Now: Wall-E is Watching.