Bioinspired cross-medium wall-climbing robot with high-performance adhesion and contact adaptability

TL;DR

This paper introduces a wall-climbing robot inspired by geckos and octopuses that can climb various surfaces in different environments.

Contribution

The robot features hybrid tracks with bioinspired microstructures that enable cross-medium adhesion and adaptability.

Findings

The robot's hybrid tracks provide strong adhesion in both dry and underwater environments.

The design prevents interface crack propagation and improves peeling resistance.

The robot successfully adapts to diverse surfaces in complex environments.

Abstract

Wall-climbing robots (WCRs) using numerous attachment/grasping mechanisms replace humans in executing repetitive or challenging tasks in space-confined, high-risk, or radioactive environments, garnering substantial research interest. Nevertheless, their application remains limited to environment- and surface-specific scenarios. To this end, we present a contact-adaptable, peeling-resistant, and cross-medium WCR integrated with gecko- and octopus-inspired self-adaptive rigid-soft hybrid tracks. The hollow mushroom-shaped adhesive microstructures (HMSAMSs) on the robot tracks simultaneously couple the adhesive structural morphologies of gecko and octopus as well as inherit their functions. These microstructures demonstrate superior normal and tangential adhesion forces and adhesion-to-preload ratios in dry and underwater environments, endowing the WCR with stable cross-medium performance. Furthermore, we construct discrete HMSAMS patches and rigid-soft components in robot track, respectively mimicking biological adhesion’s mechanical decoupling and bone-muscle functions, which effectively prevent interface crack propagation, improve peeling threshold, and enhance contact adaptability. The WCR with aforementioned advantages substantially adapts to diverse material surfaces in complex multimedia environments, accelerating its universal application.

A cross-medium wall-climbing robot expeditiously crawls on uneven vertical and inverted surfaces in multimedia environments.

Figures