Smooth Vertical Surface Climbing With Directional Adhesion

By Sangbae Kim, Matthew Spenko, Salomon Trujillo, B. Heyneman, Daniel Santos, Mark R. Cutkosky. IEEE Transactions on robotics, 2008

642 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Stickybot is a bioinspired robot that climbs smooth vertical surfaces such as glass, plastic, and ceramic tile at 4 cm/s. The robot employs several design principles adapted from the gecko including a hierarchy of compliant structures, directional adhesion, and control of tangential contact forces to achieve control of adhesion. We describe the design and fabrication methods used to create underactuated, multimaterial structures that conform to surfaces over a range of length scales from centimeters to micrometers. At the finest scale, the undersides of Stickybot's toes are covered with arrays of small, angled polymer stalks. Like the directional adhesive structures used by geckos, they readily adhere when pulled tangentially from the tips of the toes toward the ankles; when pulled in the opposite direction, they release. Working in combination with the compliant structures and directional adhesion is a force control strategy that balances forces among the feet and promotes smooth attachment and detachment of the toes.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Mechanics of Materials, Surfaces, Coatings and Films

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/61a57ae0bbed75cb826a7e53a124938c6bb8ea09

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Metin Sitti
2. J. Bullock
3. W. Federle

In Mechanics of Materials

1. Metin Sitti
2. J. Bullock
3. Taewon Seo
4. W. Federle

Citations in the corpus

• The effect of surface roughness on claw and adhesive hair performance in the dock beetle Gastrophysa viridula (2011, background): “However, the performance of these systems has so far been mainly tested on smooth substrates (e.g., Kim et al., 2008; Murphy & Sitti, 2007).”
• Soft robotics: Technologies and systems pushing the boundaries of robot abilities (2016, background): “Climbing Stickybot Hierarchical structures, directional adhesion, and control of tangential contact forces (67)”
• The state of the art in biomimetics (2012, background): “(Some figures may appear in colour only in the online journal)”
• Tank-Like Module-Based Climbing Robot Using Passive Compliant Joints (2013, methodology): “Stickybot was developed for upward climbing using directional fibrillar footpads and hierarchical complaint body design [14].”