ME Seminar - Biomimetics of animal locomotion: from biology to engineering

Guest Speaker: Prof. DAI Zhendong

Institute of Bio-inspired Structure and Surface Engineering
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Prof. Dai Zhendong is the director and founder of the Institute of Bio-inspired Structure and Surface Engineering (IBSS) at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA). His research encompasses tribo-irreversible thermodynamics, biomimetics related to gecko locomotion, as well as animal motion regulation, locomotion dynamics, adhesive materials, and gecko-inspired robotics.

Prof. Dai serves on the editorial boards of various journals and is a standing member of multiple academic societies. He has led numerous significant projects, including three NSFC key projects and three key international collaboration projects. Additionally, he has authored six books and over 400 peer-reviewed papers.

Many creatures, such as beetles and geckos, have obtained excellent abilities moving on vertical even inverted substrates. Adhesive materials and structure inspired by gecko’s toe have many potential applications. Here we report our recent studies on the bio-inspired attachment device for health keeping exercise in Chinese Space Station, bio-inspired robot which climbing on ceiling surface and introduce our studies on gecko’s adhesive pads, attaching and detaching technique, adhesive materials and robot design.

Gecko has abilities to move on high slope, vertical and up-side down surface, which need the feet generate attractive force between toes and substrate, especially, on the wall and/or ceiling surfaces. Those performances result from the morphology and structure of the feet and also the characters of the materials.

During on-orbit flight in Chinese Space Station, astronauts are flying in weightless situation, which let side effect to the health because there is no force stimulating the muscles and also make the operation very difficult for the hand are required to hold its body. Here we proposed an adhesive shoe to make them adhere on the surface of space station. The design, at first time, provide a possibility to exercise the flexor of leg by adhesive force stimulating, which have puzzled astronautics flight for long time.

Many applications need robot climbing on wall and crawling on ceiling surfaces. Such as detecting and cleaning, adhesive and high frictional contact pads are important to make the robot moving higher efficiency. Inspired by the micro-structure of gecko pads, we designed soft pads, which can self-adapted to the surface and generate adhesive forces. The results show that bionic designed soft pads express excellent performance, which makes gecko-inspired robot climbing on ceiling surfaces.