This thesis provides methods on the design and fabrication of bio-inspired controllable dry adhesives while presenting possible robotic applications with working prototypes. The ultimate goal of this work is to provide answers to a few questions that has hindered the development in the field, especially on applying dry adhesives to practical applications. The first section of this study is devoted to resolving the issue of mass manufacturing of controlled dry adhesives. We have enhanced the existing adhesive design by including a slanted wedge structure. Additionally, we have developed a novel manufacturing technique based on ultra-precision diamond tip rule that enables large-scale manufacture of wedge-shaped programmable dry adhesives. To our knowledge, the quality of adhesives manufa...[ Read more ]

This thesis provides methods on the design and fabrication of bio-inspired controllable dry adhesives while presenting possible robotic applications with working prototypes. The ultimate goal of this work is to provide answers to a few questions that has hindered the development in the field, especially on applying dry adhesives to practical applications. The first section of this study is devoted to resolving the issue of mass manufacturing of controlled dry adhesives. We have enhanced the existing adhesive design by including a slanted wedge structure. Additionally, we have developed a novel manufacturing technique based on ultra-precision diamond tip rule that enables large-scale manufacture of wedge-shaped programmable dry adhesives. To our knowledge, the quality of adhesives manufactured using the technique described in this thesis is by far the best in terms of cost and performance. Micro-scale 3D printing has also been used to create more complicated adhesive structures, such as the funnel-on-wedge structure. The second section of this study is the robotic applications of the controllable dry adhesives. We have used the controllable dry adhesives to construct robotic devices for practical applications. We began by developing grippers for glass picking using controllable dry adhesives. We have created generations of controllable dry adhesion gripper prototypes, ranging from manually driven gripper tools to pneumatically powered gripper. Moreover, we have developed sensors for our controllable dry adhesion grippers and built Viko, an adaptive gecko gripper that monitors contact status through vision-based tactile sensors. We have also utilized the newly discovered jamming effect of the controllable dry adhesives to develop flexible connections for soft robots.