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Gecko-Inspired Robotic Gripper for Grabbing Space Debris

About 500,000 pieces of human-made debris are orbiting our planet - posing a threat to satellites, space vehicles, and the astronauts aboard those vehicles. Engineers from Stanford University and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have combined gecko-inspired adhesives and a custom robotic gripper to create a device for grabbing space debris . They tested their gripper in multiple zero gravity settings, including the International Space Station. The adhesives have previously been used in climbing robots and were inspired by geckos, which can climb walls because their feet have microscopic flaps that, when in full contact with a surface, create a specific force between the feet and the surface. The new gripper the researchers created has a grid of adhesive squares on the front and arms with thin adhesive strips that can fold out and move toward the middle of the robot from either side. The grid can stick to flat objects, like a solar panel, and the arms can grab curved objects, like a rocket body. The group also designed the gripper to switch between a relaxed and rigid state.

Topics:
Aerospace Automation Materials Motion Control Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING] We have a lot of junk orbiting Earth and it's dangerous. And so people have been looking at different ways to latch onto items in space and possibly retrieve them, maybe even reuse some of them. So what we've developed is a gripper that uses gecko-inspired adhesives. It's a microstructured adhesive. It's much simpler than what the gecko has,

    00:00:29 but it works the same way. Most of the time it's not sticky. It has tiny, little microscopic flaps. And it only sticks when you apply a load to it in the direction along the surface. So as you apply a load, each of these flaps lays down like this, and you get very close contact. And it's this close contact that turns on the adhesive. When you release that pulling force, it comes back up with elastic energy

    00:00:53 and comes off with almost no force. We aimed at grasping a variety of objects from these solar panels that have big flat surfaces. Some of these rocket bodies that have really curved like cylindrical surfaces. That's why we have two modules. The type of adhesive we use is space qualified. It still remains sticky even in the very challenging environment of space. Traditional methods of grasping like suction cups

    00:01:21 don't work because there's no atmosphere. And anything sticky-- and they're called pressure sensitive adhesives-- in the cold, it basically becomes brittle and no longer sticks. We've tested it on free floating platforms both at Stanford and at Jet Propulsion Labs where our collaborators are. With their help, we've tested it on the zero gravity parabolic flight airplane. And then finally, Aaron Parnassus Group at Jet Propulsion Labs made a version of the grippers

    00:01:46 that we have that went up to the International Space Station. We also imagine that it could be used for small robots that climb around structures in space in order to do maintenance or inspections. What we design is a proof of concept prototype and then what needs to eventually happen is make a sturdy gripper that will go on the end of a robot arm in space. [MUSIC PLAYING]

    00:02:19 For more, please visit us at stanford.edu.