Influence of vibrations and shocks on the stability of biomimetic attachments

Abstract

During the process of adhesion, climbing, nondestructive handling, and other interface-manipulation engineering applications, vibrations and shocks affect the stability of contact interfaces. To adapt to climbing and jumping processes, numerous organisms have evolved foot-functional structures with multi-level buffer adaptations and multi-mechanism synergy to enhance surface adhesion, which provide a biological template for bionic attachment technologies. Current tests that evaluate bionic attachment technologies consider only the static contact surfaces and neglect the impacts of shock and vibration factors. In particular, the influence of resonance phenomena on the stabilities of attachments, which restricts the determination of the boundary of attachment stability for practical engineering applications. In this study, the attachment abilities of typical climbing organisms in vibration-containing environments were investigated. A bionic attachment structure with a multi-layer buffer and multi-mechanism attachment was designed. The results show that organisms with different attachment mechanisms exhibit different attachment stabilities in the presence of vibrations. The designed bionic attachment structure achieves good attachment in collision/impact-containing environments for footed robots and drones, and good switching between attachment and detachment during handling in the presence of vibrations. The investigated bionic structure also provides a reference for the implementation of bionic attachment technologies for application in vibration and impact environments.