Universal bioinspired adhesives for arbitrary unknown surfaces toward dexterous robotic manipulation

Dexterous robotic hands are pivotal for complex manipulation in unstructured environments, yet they face significant challenges in reliably grasping fragile, heavy, or irregularly shaped objects using conventional friction-based methods. Gecko-inspired adhesion technology presents a compelling alternative, yet remain challenge in achieving reliable adhesion across arbitrary unknown surfaces. Here, we propose a universal bioinspired adhesive for arbitrary unknown surfaces toward dexterous robotic manipulation. The adhesive comprises a top layer with a micro core-shell mushroom array that enables adaptive adhesion to microscale roughness via soft-rigid stiffness modulation, a middle rigid thin layer, and a bottom hierarchical soft pillar array for macro-scale contour adaptation via rotation of the thin layer and compliance of the pillars. Importantly, the proposed structure is fabricated in one step through the electric field-induced growth of multilayer polymers, with precise control over their morphological features and stiffness characteristics. Experiment shows a tenfold adhesion enhancement on arbitrary surfaces versus conventional structures, achieving unprecedented adaptability. Furthermore, grasping applications using proposed adhesive-based multi-fingered dexterous robot demonstrated stable manipulation of diverse objects, including fragile, heavy, irregularly shaped, rough-textured, and high-torque-loading specimens, endows robots with extensive target adaptability and operational stability unattainable through conventional mechanical clamping actions alone. (Figure presented.)