Microspine grippers are small spines commonly found on insect legs that reinforce surface interaction by engaging with asperities to increase shear force and traction. An array of such microspines, when integrated into the limbs or undercarriage of a robot, can provide the ability to maneuver uneven terrains, traverse inclines, and even climb walls. Conformability and adaptability of soft robots makes them ideal candidates for these applications involving traversal of complex, unstructured terrains. However, there remains a real-life realization gap for soft locomotors pertaining to their transition from controlled lab environment to the field by improving grip stability through effective integration of microspines. We propose a passive, compliant microspine stacked array design to enhance the locomotion capabilities of mobile soft robots, in our case, ones that are motor tendon actuated. We offer a standardized microspine array integration method with effective soft-compliant stiffness integration, and reduced complexity resulting from a single actuator passively controlling them. The presented design utilizes a two-row, stacked microspine array configuration that offers additional gripping capabilities on extremely steep/irregular surfaces from the top row while not hindering the effectiveness of the more frequently active bottom row. We explore different configurations of the microspine array to account for changing surface topologies and enable independent, adaptable gripping of asperities per microspine. Field test experiments are conducted on various rough surfaces including concrete, brick, compact sand, and tree roots with three robots consisting of a baseline without microspines compared against two robots with different combinations of microspine arrays. Tracking results indicate that the inclusion of microspine arrays increases planar displacement on average by 15 and 8 times.

Although wheeled robots have been predominant for planetary exploration, their geometry limits their capabilities when traveling over steep slopes, through rocky terrains, and in microgravity. Legged robots equipped with grippers are a viable alternative to overcome these obstacles. This paper proposes a gripping system that can provide legged space-explorer robots a reliable anchor on uneven rocky terrain. This gripper provides the benefits of soft gripping technology by using segmented tendon-driven fingers to adapt to the target shape, and creates a strong adhesion to rocky surfaces with the help of microspines. The gripping performances are showcased, and multiple experiments demonstrate the impact of the pulling angle, target shape, spine configuration, and actuation power on the performances. The results show that the proposed gripper can be a suitable solution for advanced space exploration, including climbing, lunar caves, or exploration of the surface of asteroids.

If you ask these tiny drones, "Do you even lift, bro?" you will get a resounding yes. Researchers at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and Stanford University have developed a line of small flying bots that can move objects that are 40 times their weight. The drones, called FlyCroTugs (short for "flying, micro tugging robots"), are equipped with a system of winches, adhesives and microspines that allow the tiny crafts, which weigh just a few ounces each, to latch onto just about anything. The winch is one of the few immovable parts of the highly customizable drone -- just about everything else about it can be modified for a given scenario. The grippers can be moved around depending on the landing surface, and the drone can take on additional accessories like wheels when a job calls for it.

UAV designs are a perpetual compromise between the ability to fly long distances efficiently with payloads (fixed-wing) and the ability to maneuver, hover, and land easily (rotorcraft). With a very few rather bizarre exceptions, any aircraft that try to offer the best of both worlds end up relatively complicated, inefficient, and expensive. The ideal fantasy UAV would be a fixed-wing aircraft with the magical ability to land on a dime, and a group of researchers from the University of Sherbrooke in Canada have come very close to making that happen, with a little airplane that uses legs and claws to reliably perch on walls. The majority of the perching robots that we've seen are quadrotors. Perching with a quadrotor is significantly easier than perching with a fixed-wing aircraft, because you have many more degrees of control, and you're not obligated to keep the vehicle moving forward all the time.

UAV designs are a perpetual compromise between the ability to fly long distances efficiently with payloads (fixed-wing) and the ability to maneuver, hover, and land easily (rotorcraft). With a very few rather bizarre exceptions, any aircraft that try to offer the best of both worlds end up relatively complicated, inefficient, and expensive. The ideal fantasy UAV would be a fixed-wing aircraft with the magical ability to land on a dime, and a group of researchers from the University of Sherbrooke in Canada have come very close to making that happen, with a little airplane that uses legs and claws to reliably perch on walls. The majority of the perching robots that we've seen are quadrotors. Perching with a quadrotor is significantly easier than perching with a fixed-wing aircraft, because you have many more degrees of control, and you're not obligated to keep the vehicle moving forward all the time.

Over a decade ago, Stanford roboticists started experimenting with ways of using arrays of very small spines to help climbing robots grip rough surfaces. These microspine grippers have been used on all kinds of research robots since then, and recently, NASA has decided that microspines are the best way for spacecraft to grab onto asteroids. Yesterday at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in South Korea, Shiquan Wang from Stanford presented a new microspine-based palm design for rock-climbing robots. These palms use microspines that can support four times the weight of previous designs, which will be enough to turn JPL's RoboSimian DRC robot into a champion rock climber. And we're not talking just scrambling up slopes: It'll be able to scale vertical rock faces, and even clamber around overhangs.

Morgan Pope is a PhD student investigating robots that live at the boundary of airborne and surface locomotion at Stanford's Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Lab. He wrote about SCAMP, a flying and perching robot, for Automaton earlier this year. These places have something in common: we have a need to understand what's going on where established infrastructure can't give us good data. Advances in computation, fabrication, and materials over the last half-century have resulted in small, cheap, and lightweight sensors that can provide us with these data; now the task is to find ways to deploy such sensors rapidly and effectively. One way to do this is with small, agile aerial vehicles like quadrotors.