1. From my point of view I think that the general need that guided the work of this project was to have a new superhero able to climb a vertical surface looking like a gecko.
2. The design team made the commitment taking an adaptive design which consisted in some other experiments related to this, as a result there was a lot of information available for this project. They divided it in two groups, one team looked for the way to use electricity to climb on walls, and the other group tried to make a system that let humans to climb like geckos.
3. The team that tried to make a system went to Berkeley University to do research about geckos toes pads and also went to Stanford University where a climbing robots for smooth and rough surfaces were developed. The other team went to SRI international to do research in a kind of an electrical sticky tape called electro adhesion.
4. First thing they did was going to a pet store to look for an animal that grabbed their attention for the project of a human able to climb a vertical surface. After that they went over to some universities that had done this type of research and built robots for this. They realize that this project was going to be difficult because this “gecko superhero” has to be able to manage 180 pounds that a regular person weighs. They consulted different types of experts for this project and also received help from two of them.
5. I believed that the major functional requirement was to climb walls.
6. In this project an example of design constraint will be: able to climb walls, be safe, and climb rough surfaces. A design criteria will be able to hold the amount of weight of a person.
7. One team chose to develop a gecko's paddle using silicon sticky pads, each paddle will have 23 pads and each pad will support approximate 9 pounds. They used a 3D printer, called SLS (Selective Laser Sintering), to make the actual paddle. For the pads they used a CNC machine (Computer
