SGER: Biomimetic Wet Attachment Mechanism for Miniature Climbing Robots in Unstructured Environments

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Robotics and Computer Vision ProgramABSTRACTProposal #: 0328579Title: SGER: Biomimetic Wet Attachment Mechanism for Miniature Climbing Robots in Unstructured EnvironmentsPI: Sitti, MetinCarnegie Mellon UniversityThis research investigates the development of an untested and novel capillary forces based attachment mechanism for miniature climbing robots. As different from the currently available techniques, this novel technique would enable robust and power efficient climbing to wide range of unstructured surfaces with relatively high attachment forces. The proposed wet adhesion based attachment and detachment mechanism is inspired from beetles, ants, crickets, etc. type of insects. Design and manufacturing of the first biomimetic polymer micro/nano-hair structures with microfluidic channels and liquid reservoir would be realized, and its feasibility would be demonstrated. Compliant polymer hairs and their liquid layer could adapt to wide range of surface roughness by filling the gaps, and attachment forces few magnitudes order higher than the robot body weight would become possible using strong capillary forces. Moreover, the detachment of the stuck micro/nano-hairs would be investigated since the detachment mechanism has not been completely understood yet. By an optimized detachment mechanism with minimal forces, power consumption of the miniature robots would be reduced significantly. By the proposed synthetic micro/nano-structure manufacturing techniques and micro/nano-force models to be developed, robust miniature climbing and walking robotic systems in unstructured environments would become possible in the near future. Thus, more lives would be saved in disasters and accidents, and we could access to unprecedented and hazardous areas in nuclear