Climbing Adhesion This page consolidates work started under a couple of different projects including ClimbingRobot, with the goal of creating patches of synthetic dry adhesive material that are suitable for climbing vertical surfaces. These adhesives are currently being used with StickyBotIII . This work has been funded in part by DARPA and by the National Science Foundation under award NIRT (0708367), in collaboration with UCSB. Directional Dry Adhesion Wet Adhesion Selective Particle Adhesion Fiber Drawing Climbing Adhesion Publications

SEM of microwedges in loaded state

Directional Dry Adhesion

• Design and fabrication of directional, hierarchical adhesives
• Application to the StickybotIII gecko-inspired climbing robot

Wet Adhesion

• WetAdhesion (private)

Selective Particle Adhesion

• SelectiveParticleAdhesion (private)
• MicroIndenting (private)

Fiber Drawing

• FiberDrawing (private)

Climbing Adhesion Publications

P. Day, M. Cutkosky, R. Greco, and A. Mclaughlin, The effect of He2+ Ion Irradiation on Adhesion of Polymer Micro-structure Based Dry Adhesives. ANS Journal of Nuclear Science and Engineering. Accepted, September 2010.

D. Soto, Force Space Studies of Elastomeric Anisotropic Fibrillar Adhesives, Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, August 2010.

D. Soto, G Hill, A Parness, N Esparza, M Cutkosky, and T Kenny, "Effect of fibril shape on adhesive properties," Appl. Phys. Lett. 97, 053701 (2010), DOI:10.1063/1.3464553.

N Gravish, M Wilkinson, S Sponberg, A Parness, N Esparza, D Soto, T Yamaguchi, M Broide, M Cutkosky, C Creton, and K Autumn "Rate-dependent frictional adhesion in natural and synthetic gecko setae" J. R. Soc. Interface published online before print June 3, 2009, doi:10.1098/rsif.2009.0133

Asbeck, A.; Dastoor, S.; Parness, A.; Fullerton, L.; Esparza, N.; Soto, D.; Heyneman, B.; Cutkosky, M. "Climbing rough vertical surfaces with hierarchical directional adhesion" IEEE ICRA 2009 Page(s):2675 - 2680.

A. Parness, D. Soto, N. Esparza, N. Gravish, M. Wilkinson, K. Autumn, and M. Cutkosky, "A microfabricated wedge-shaped adhesive array displaying gecko-like dynamic adhesion, directionality, and long life-time", J. R. Soc. Interface published online before print March 18, 2009, doi:10.1098/rsif.2009.0048.

D. Soto, A. Parness, N. Esparza, T. Kenny, K. Autumn and M.R. Cutkosky, "Microfabricated Dry Adhesive Displaying Frictional Adhesion," extended abstract for Hilton Head MEMS conference, June 1-5 2008.

D. Santos, B. Heyneman, K. Sangbae, N. Esparza, and M. Cutkosky,"Gecko-inspired climbing behaviors on vertical and overhanging surfaces" Robotics and Automation, 2008. ICRA 2008. IEEE International Conference on 19-23 May 2008 Page(s):1125 - 1131

D. Santos, K. Sangbae, M. Spenko, A. Parness, and M. Cutkosky, "Directional Adhesive Structures for Controlled Climbing on Smooth Vertical Surfaces" Robotics and Automation, 2007 IEEE International Conference on 10-14 April 2007 Page(s):1262 - 1267

D. Santos, M. Spenko, A. Parness, S. Kim and M.R. Cutkosky, "Directional adhesion for climbing: theoretical and practical considerations," Journal of Adhesion Science and Technology, Vol. 21, No. 1213, 2007, p. 1317-1341.

D. Santos, Contact Modeling and Directional Adhesion for Climbing Robots, Ph.D. Thesis, Stanford University, October, 2007.

K. Autumn, A. Dittmore, D. Santos, M. Spenko and M. Cutkosky, "Frictional adhesion: a new angle on gecko attachment," Journal of Experimental Biology, 209, 3569-3579 (2006).