Research On Adhesion Mechanism And Control Method Of The Biomimetic Gecko Micro/Nano-Meter Array

Biomimetic micro/nano adhesive arrays are important to robot applications on fault inspection, disaster rescue, wall cleaning and military reconnaissance. By mimicking the attachment mechanism of the gecko, direct adhesion can be obtained under the van der Waals forces between the nano hair array and the contacted surfaces. The toe surface of the gecko has two elaborate hierarchical structures, micro-scale seta array and nano-scale spatulae array, which result in the van der Waals forces because of the realization of molecular contact between the spatulas and contacted surfaces. Inspired by the merits of the fine adhesive structure, such as the large adhesion force, good adaptive ability to rough surfaces, harmless to the contact surfaces, self-cleaning property and durability, biomimetic adhesive arrays can be developed for climbing robots.Recently, the research of biomimetic gecko adhesion array has achieved preliminary results on mechanism, fabrication and testing. However, it is possible to apply the adhesion array to the biomimetic gecko robot only after a series of theoretical and design problems being solved. Presently, about the research of adhesion mechanism, the interests are mainly focused on the single spatulae, and there are little work on the setae array and spatulae array, especially for the double layer structure. Meanwhile theoretical explanations to experimental phenomena remain inadequate. Therefore, further understanding of the gecko's adhesive mechanism should be made. About the parameter design of the adhesion array, it is essential to analyze the effects of environmental factors deeply and systematically, which consist of the surface roughness, the material hydrophobicity and self-cleaning property. Now, all of the fabricated synthetic adhesion arrays are one single layer of micro or nano structure, and the attachment and detachment are made by controlling the action of the whole array. There is great difference between that and the gecko's muscle subgroup control. Thus a design by controlling the action of different parts should be developed, which allows the array to switch between attachment...