Research on the adhesion characteristic of climbing robot feet with bionic gecko microarray for spacecraft based on DEM

At present, the robot arm technology occupies the dominant position in the space payload control field. However, with the limitations of robot arm technology, the load control technology with higher flexibility and mobility came into being. The space miniature climbing robot performs on-orbit control tasks such as fault repair and waste removal by crawling through the robotic arm and adhering to the target spacecraft. In this paper, the adhesion characteristic of space climbing robot is studied, an adhesion microarray structure is proposed, and the influence of the contact area, slenderness ratio, length, diameter and density of the microarray on the adhesion characteristics in the zero - gravity environment is analyzed respectively by using the discrete element software EDEM. Results show that: 1) Increasing the density of array with no fibers tangling each other, can obtain the larger adhesion. 2) In order to obtain a larger tangential adhesion, the fiber diameter should be increased and the length be reduced, while in the actual environment, the length/diameter ratio should be appropriately increased because limitation of adaptability to the surface.