Shape Deposition Manufacturing of Biologically Inspired Hierarchical Microstructures

The applications of dry adhesives range from part handling in manufacturing to aids for human and robotic climbing. Nature provides inspiration in the hierarchical structures used by geckos and spiders to attach using Van der Waals forces. Among the challenges faced in creating synthetic dry adhesives are the need to conform to surfaces at length scales from centimeters to tens of nanometers and the need to create arrays of compliant asymmetric structures at the micro scale. Initial attempts from the literature are reviewed and a new approach based on a hybrid additive/subtractive prototyping technique called Shape Deposition Manufacturing (SDM) is proposed.