Categor=ies: Adhesion, BioinspiredRobots

Gecko-Inspired Adhesives

Projects under this research category include:

• Directional, controllable adhesives and manufacturing methods for creating them.
• MicroTugs -- Tiny robots able to pull 100x body weight up a wall, or 2000x body weight along the ground!
• Human Climbing depends on efficiently scaling the adhesives so that large loads are evenly distributed over large areas.
• AdhesionNASA for space applications
• Stickybot III developments, including new ankle and foot designs for greater maximum adhesion on smooth and micro-rough surfaces
• AdhesiveSurfaceGrasping -- Grasping walls and ceilings using opposed directional adhesives and grasping surfaces like solar panels on space debris
  • StickybotIII Climbing Videos
• Tendon-inspired mechanism which passively aligns adhesives and evenly distributes loads to the entire surface of the adhesive.
• GeckoAdhesionMeasurements -- How well do geckos distribute their adhesive forces? What can we learn from the systems they employ at the macroscopic scale?

* Climbing with wet adhesion

Other pages: Adhesion category

Publications: AdhesionPublications

Spines and Microspines

On rough surfaces, the best technology continues to be the microspine mechanisms originally developed in this lab in 2004-2005. The spine technology has continued to evolve through collborations with several other groups:

• The old BDML Spinybot Page -- video links are broken, but you can find them on YouTube now.
  • The ICRA 2006 Spinybot II Video (Best Video awardee)
• The RiSE Robot at Boston Dynamics uses our spines. This is an outgrowth of the joint Boston Dynamics, U. Penn, CMU and Stanford RiSE project
  • http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_rise.html
• Microspines are also part of the solution package being explored by the DARPA Zman project.
• Microspines are being explored at JPL for grasping asteroids (this is the work of BDML alumnus Dr. Aaron Parness)
• Microspines are also being applied by us to perching aircraft in collaboration with U. Maryland and others.
• Microspines also underlie a miniature climber at SNU: Choi, et al. (2015) Design of a Milli-Scale, Biomimetic Platform for Climbing on a Rough Surface