Climbing with adhesion: from bioinspiration to biounderstanding

Bioinspiration is an increasingly popular design paradigm, especially as robots venture out of the laboratory and into the world. Animals are adept at coping with the variability that the world imposes. With advances in scientific tools for understanding biological structures in detail, we are increasingly able to identify design features that account for animals' robust performance. In parallel, advances in fabrication methods and materials are allowing us to engineer artificial structures with similar properties. The resulting robots become useful platforms for testing hypotheses about which principles are most important. Taking gecko-inspired climbing as an example, we show that the process of extracting principles from animals and adapting them to robots provides insights for both robotics and biology.