Switchable Adhesion Actuator for Amphibious Climbing Soft Robot

Abstract Climbing soft robots are of tremendous interest in both science and engineering due to their potential applications in intelligent surveillance, inspection, maintenance, and detection under environments away from the ground. The challenge lies in the design of a fast, robust, switchable adhesion actuator to easily attach and detach the vertical surfaces. Here, we propose a new design of pneumatic-actuated bioinspired soft adhesion actuator working both on ground and under water. It is composed of extremely soft bilayer structures with an embedded spiral pneumatic channel resting on top of a base layer with a cavity. Rather than the traditional way of directly pumping air out of the cavity for suction in hard polymer-based adhesion actuator, we inflate air into the top spiral channel to deform into a stable 3D dome shape for achieving negative pressure in the cavity. The characterization of the maximum shear adhesion force of the proposed soft adhesion actuator shows strong and rapid reversible ad...