An Underactuated Adaptive Microspines Gripper for Rough Wall

Abstract

Wall attachment has great potential in a broad range of applications such as robotic grasping, transfer printing, and asteroid sampling. Herein, a new type of underactuated bionic microspines gripper is proposed to attach to an irregular, rough wall. Experimental results revealed that the gripper, profiting from its flexible structure and underactuated linkage mechanism, is capable of adapting submillimeter scale roughness to centimeter scale geometry irregularity in both normal and tangential attachment. The rigid-flexible coupling simulation analysis validated that the rough adaptation was achieved by the passive deformation of the zigzag flexible structure, while the centimeter-scale irregularity adaptation come from the underactuated design. The attachment test of a spine confirmed that a 5 mm sliding distance of the spine tip on the fine brick wall promises a saturated tangential attachment force, which can guide the stiffness design of flexible structure and parameter selection of underactuated linkage. Furthermore, the developed microspines gripper was successfully demonstrated to grasp irregular rocks, tree trunks, and granite plates. This work presents a generally applicable and dexterous passive adaption design to achieve rough wall attachment for flat and curved objects, which promotes the understanding and application of wall attachment.