Aju Business Daily

SEOUL -- By emulating the capturing strategies of a spider, South Korean researchers fabricated an ionic spiderweb that is applicable to robotic components based on electrostatics, such as electrostatic adhesion grippers, dielectric elastomer actuators, and capacitive tactile sensors.

The National Research Foundation of Korea said a research team involving Sun Jeong-yun, a professor at Seoul National University, fabricated the ionic spiderweb with ionically conductive and stretchable organogel encapsulated with silicone rubber to form a strand shape. The team's research paper was published through the website of Science Robotics, a scientific journal.

Spiders use adhesive, stretchable, and translucent webs to capture their prey, but sustaining the capturing capability of webs can be challenging because the webs inevitably invite contamination. Spiders have developed strategies of using webs to sense prey and clean contaminants.

"We emulate the capturing strategies of a spider with a single pair of ionic threads based on electrostatics. Our ionic spiderwebs completed consecutive missions of cleaning contamination on itself, sensing approaching targets, capturing those targets, and releasing them," Sun's team said in the research paper.

The ionic spiderwebs demonstrate the importance of learning from nature and push the boundaries of soft robotics in an attempt to combine mutually complementary functions into a single unit with a simple structure, the paper said, adding that similar to the structural thread of spiderwebs, nylon thread was used as the framework to reinforce their mechanical properties.

The ionic spiderweb robustly captured various types of targets, including aluminum with a 68-fold greater mass, and it can recover its adhesion force up to 98.7 percent with electrostatic vibration cleaning, according to the paper.