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Strong adherence to underwater or wet surfaces for applications like tissue adhesion and underwater robotics is a significant challenge. This is especially apparent when switchable adhesion is required that demands rapid attachment, high adhesive capacity, and easy release. Nature displays a spectrum of permanent to reversible attachment from organisms ranging from the mussel to the octopus, providing inspiration for underwater adhesion design that has yet to be fully leveraged in synthetic systems. Here, we review the challenges and opportunities for creating underwater adhesives with a pathway to switchability. We discuss key material, geometric, modeling, and design tools necessary to achieve underwater adhesion similar to the adhesion control demonstrated in nature. Through these interdisciplinary efforts, we envision that bioinspired adhesives can rise to or even surpass the extraordinary capabilities found in biological systems.
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Amphibious Bioinspired Robots for Ocean Objects Identification
Agility, robustness, endurance, and sustainability are the main challenges of the current distributed systems for ocean objects identification. Nowadays, developing a novel marine observation network to help identify threats and to provide both an early warning and data for forecasting models is a priority of marine missions. Autonomous systems, such as underwater robots and drones, can provide worthwhile information from the ocean environment; still, they have challenges associated with endurance, performance, and recovery. Skimming drones cannot be used to perform underwater missions, need a significant amount of energy to take off, and have stability problems due to the constant ocean wave motion. As for underwater swimming robots, they are generally slow and use a significant amount of energy. To this end, there is a need to design some novel bioinspired amphibious concepts that can overcome these challenges. In this paper, a network of distributed hybrid-amphibious robots with energy harvesting capabilities will be presented. This is accomplished through novel robot systems. The Lizard-Spider Octopus-Jellyfish-Rolling Robot (LSOJRR) is one of these novel ideas, which imitates the characteristics of a Golden wheel spider with rolling, jumping, and folding capabilities over the water, a Green Basilisk lizard with running capability over the water, and an octopus with unique underwater propulsion mechanism. The LSOJRR also has applications beyond Earth, and alternative designs of this robot are explored, particularly those involving the dispersal of swarms of smaller robots that also derive their design from biology. All of the designs presented in this paper draw inspiration from nature, and strive to achieve the goal of furthering the development for marine exploration.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1757793
- PAR ID:
- 10382428
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- AIAA SCITECH 2022 Forum
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2781
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-2781
