Scaling Hard Vertical Surfaces with Compliant Microspine Arrays

By Alan T. Asbeck, Sangbae Kim, Mark R. Cutkosky, William R. Provancher, M. Lanzetta. Int. J. Robotics Res., 2006

337 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A new approach for climbing hard vertical surfaces has been developed that allows a robot to scale concrete, stucco, brick and masonry walls without using suction or adhesives.The approach is inspired by the mechanisms observed in some climbing insects and spiders and involves arrays of microspines that catch on surface asperities. The arrays are located on the toes of the robot and consist of a tuned, multi-link compliant suspension. The fundamental issues of spine allometric scaling versus surface roughness are discussed and the interaction between spines and surfaces is modeled. The toe suspension properties needed to maximize the probability that each spine will find a useable surface irregularity and to distribute climbing loads among many spines are detailed. The principles are demonstrated with a new climbing robot, SpinybotII, that can scale a wide range of flat exterior walls, carry a payload equal to its own weight, and cling without consuming power. The paper also reports how toe parameters scale with robot mass and how spines have also been used successfully on the larger RiSE robot.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Mechanics of Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/573afe900d8d9e54f6e4414b0647c98f2660483e

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Citations in the corpus

Tank-Like Module-Based Climbing Robot Using Passive Compliant Joints (2013, methodology): “Spinybot uses spiny footpads that adopt using the mechanical interlocking attaching principle, and the probability of successful attachment is increased by the compliant microspine arrays [21].”
Cooperative Grasping and Transport Using Multiple Quadrotors (2010, methodology): “Toward this design, we build upon considerable research in the area of climbing robots which generally rely on clinging to surface asperities via microspine arrays [8].”
Biologically inspired climbing with a hexapedal robot (2008, methodology): “The spines used on RiSE are adapted from an earlier design (Asbeck et al., 2006) and draw their inspiration chiefly from the spines found on insect legs (Figure 8) and whose utility has been previously found to be effective for level-ground robotic locomotion (Spagna et al., 2007).”
Smooth Vertical Surface Climbing With Directional Adhesion (2008, methodology): “Previous robots capable of climbing exterior building surfaces such as stucco and brick have utilized microspines similar to those found on insects [2], [29] or a controlled vortex that creates negative aerodynamic lift [32].”
SpinybotII: climbing hard walls with compliant microspines (2005, background): “We have found that when steel spines catch on asperities on concrete or stucco, the contact typically fails in one of three ways [30]:”
The effect of surface roughness on claw and adhesive hair performance in the dock beetle Gastrophysa viridula (2011, background): “While attempts have been made to include claw-like spines into biomimetic climbing robots (e.g., Asbeck et al., 2006; Spenko et al., 2008), a combination of adhesive and interlocking devices will be essential for a robot to be able to climb a wide variety of surfaces.”