Switchable Adhesion Actuator for Amphibious Climbing Soft Robot
Yichao Tang, Qiuting Zhang, Gaojian Lin, and Jie Yin

TL;DR
This paper introduces a novel switchable soft adhesion actuator for amphibious climbing robots, enabling rapid, reversible attachment on various surfaces both on land and underwater, enhancing soft robot versatility.
Contribution
The paper presents a new pneumatic bioinspired adhesion actuator design that works on multiple surfaces and environments, and integrates it into an amphibious climbing soft robot.
Findings
Achieves strong, reversible adhesion on diverse surfaces
Climbing speed reaches 286 mm/min with 200g load
Operates effectively underwater and on slippery surfaces
Abstract
Climbing soft robots are of tremendous interest in both science and engineering due to their potential applications in intelligent surveillance, inspection, maintenance, and detection under environments away from the ground. The challenge lies in the design of a fast, robust, switchable adhesion actuator to easily attach and detach the vertical surfaces. Here, we propose a new design of pneumatic-actuated bioinspired soft adhesion actuator working both on ground and under water. It is composed of extremely soft bilayer structures with an embedded spiral pneumatic channel resting on top of a base layer with a cavity. Rather than the traditional way of directly pumping air out of the cavity for suction in hard polymer-based adhesion actuator, we inflate air into the top spiral channel to deform into a stable 3D domed shape for achieving negative pressure in the cavity. The…
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