Gas‐Lubricated Vibration‐Based Adhesion for Robotics

Abstract

Controllable adhesion, the ability to selectively attach or detach from a surface, is an essential capability for many engineered systems, such as material processing equipment, wall-climbing robots, and pick-and-place machinery. Robots capable of controllable adhesion have applications for inspection and repair, surveillance, and exploration of environments unsuitable for humans. [1,2] A variety of controllable adhesion techniques have been proposed to enable these use cases, including methods relying on pneumatic, electromagnetic, and dry fibrillar adhesive forces between a robot and a surface. While existing techniques are often effective, they usually require relatively heavy and energyconsuming components and/or intrinsically link high normal and shear adhesion.In this work, we develop an adhesion mechanism that relies on the fluidmediated adhesive force between an oscillatory plate and a surface. This lightweight, low-power mechanism provides high normal-but low-shear-adhesion, making it uniquely suitable for robotic applications including mobile robots and some manipulation tasks.Previous approaches have used active pneumatic adhesion (i.e., suction) [3,4] or strong electromagnets or permanent magnets [5] to demonstrate high adhesive stresses to enable wall climbing for relatively heavy systems (e.g., σ max ¼ 20.1 kPa for an individual suction unit weighing 0.8 kg [6] ). However, these approaches are, in general, limited to nonporous and ferromagnetic surfaces, respectively. In addition to surface restrictions, these systems usually require additional bulky hardware (i.e., traditional pumps and magnets). Despite these disadvantages, some pneumatic and electromagnetic approaches do have the advantage that they do not require direct contact with surfaces for adhesion. Thus, adhesion can be maintained while the manipulator or mobile robot smoothly slides across the adhering surface. This non-or light-contact mode of adhesion may be advantageous for mobile inspection robots that have to move easily across surfaces.Active pneumatic adhesion is advantageous in that pumps are commercially available and are relatively straightforward to control and integrate into a physical system. However, at small scales, these advantages are lost as the manufacturing of micro-electromechanical system micropumps [7] requires specialized high-precision equipment. Some studies have investigated

Benefits of controlled inclination for contactless transport by squeeze-film levitation

“…Therefore, it seems most appropriate to interpret the variation with of the levitation forces and moment as a variation with the levitation height . The latter is typically a ‘dependent’ variable that responds freely to changes in the load , for instance, the change in apparent weight of a mobile robot as it travels along a curved path as in figure 2( b ) (Weston-Dawkes et al., 2021). (Note that, for oscillators with sufficiently low mass or flexural rigidity, and may be affected significantly by variations in and the tilt angle (Ilssar & Bucher, 2017; Weston-Dawkes et al., 2021); such coupled interactions are not considered below.…”

“…Under a limited range of operating conditions – namely, for surfaces with millimetric characteristic dimensions or oscillation frequencies as low as several hundred hertz – this steady force has been observed to transition from strong repulsion to weak suction of less than 1 gf (Andrade, Ramos, Adamowski, & Marzo, 2020; Sadayuki, 2002; Takasaki, Terada, Kato, Ishino, & Mizuno, 2010; Yoshimoto, Shou, & Somaya, 2013). Recent experiments have shown that this minor attractive load capacity is magnified a thousand fold when the stiffness of the oscillator is reduced substantially to provide pronounced flexural deformations that may be subject to non-negligible fluid–structure coupling (Colasante, 2015; Weston-Dawkes et al., 2021). A preliminary theoretical analysis (Ramanarayanan & Sánchez, 2022) indicated that the range of operating conditions under which attraction occurs, as well as the magnitude of the resulting force, grows substantially with the wavenumber of oscillation, i.e.…”

“…Proposed applications of SFL include, primarily, assembly line manufacturing of touch-sensitive items, such as surface-mount devices for circuit boards (Andrade et al., 2020) and glass substrates to be installed in liquid-crystal displays (Hatanaka, Koike, Nakamura, Ueha, & Hashimoto, 1999), and load-carrying ‘soft’ robots that can travel over multifarious terrains (Weston-Dawkes et al., 2021); see figure 2 for a rudimentary visualization of each. Pursuant of these applications, a number of methods have been proposed to modify the basic SFL configuration to produce also lateral forces, as reviewed in the following paragraphs.…”

Climbing robots for manufacturing

“…For instance, dual-wheel modules were created to balance forces on surfaces with varying curvatures and increase friction [ 24 ]. The spring plate connection between the wheels can isolate the additional force generated by the tyre mass when the suction module vibrates [ 91 ]. Adding two DOFs to magnetic adhesion wheels can achieve shape-adaptive capabilities while guaranteeing that the adhesion force is always directed normally to the surface [ 22 ].…”

Flexible and Slim Device Switching Air Blowing and Suction by a Single Airflow Control

“…Suction is useful for holding objects [6] [12] [13] because it acts as a function of adsorption, increasing surface friction. Blowing creates a thin layer of air between the FDR device and the contact target and reduces surface friction [14]. The advantage 1 IEEE ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION LETTERS.…”