Universal bioinspired adhesives for arbitrary unknown surfaces toward dexterous robotic manipulation

Wang et al. Microsystems & Nanoengineering (2026)12:213 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41378-026-01338-6 ARTICLE Microsystems & Nanoengineering www.nature.com/micronano Open Access Universal bioinspired adhesives for arbitrary unknown surfaces toward dexterous robotic manipulation 1234567890():,; 1234567890():,; 1234567890():,; 1234567890():,; Duorui Wang1,2, Ronghong Wei2, Jinyu Zhang2, Tianyi Xu2, Hongmiao Tian2 ✉, Xiangming Li1,2, Xiaoliang Chen Chunhui Wang2 and Jinyou Shao1,2 1,2 , Abstract 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. Introduction Multi-fingered dexterous robotic hands, as key hardware for embodied intelligence, with their high degrees of freedom and precise force-control capabilities, enable stable grasping of objects with various shapes and sizes, holding significant value in assembly, service, and hazardous environment operations1–4. Traditional grasping primarily relies on enveloping or pinching by the fingers, maintaining grip through friction and shape matching. However, as task complexity increases and the diversity of objects grows, conventional gripping methods still face Correspondence: Hongmiao Tian () 1 Frontier Institute of Science and Technology (FIST), Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, Shaanxi 710049, China 2 Micro-and Nano-Technology Research Center, State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, Shaanxi 710049, China notable limitations: excessive normal pressure can easily cause damage or deformation to extremely fragile or lowstiffness objects; for heavy or high-torque load-bearing objects, reliance solely on friction may lead to slippage or require extremely large gripping forces; and in unstructured environments with unknown surface topography, traditional gripping struggles to maintain stable contact while adapting to morphological variations. These challenges drive researchers to continuously explore novel gripping strategies, either through mechanical innovation or by incorporating sophisticated sensing systems5–8, to enhance the adaptability and stability of grasping. One approach to address these issues involves using complex image processing to precisely control grasp pose and contact forces. However, such methods typically require intricate procedures and control schemes, which can be cumbersome and difficult to generalize. In recent © The Author(s) 2026 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Wang et al. Microsystems & Nanoengineering (2026)12:213 years, integrating functional adhesive layers at the tips of multi-fingered dexterous hands to assist or partially replace purely mechanical gripping has become an important approach to expanding robotic grasping capabilities9,10. This enables grasping with lower pressure, higher stability, and greater adaptability. Among these, gecko-inspired bioinspired dry adhesives based on van der Waals forces11–14 has shown broad prospects in fields such as flexible grippers10,15–18, epidermal electronics19–23, and wall-climbing robots24–27, owing to its strong material universality, residue-free surfaces, and reusability. Studies have shown that introducing such adhesive layers at robotic end-effectors can significantly enhance operational stability on target surfaces, particularly enabling damage-free grasping across various materials and environments. Although existing bioinspired adhesive structures have achieved remarkable adhesion performance, even surpassing the adhesion capability of natural gecko setae on surfaces such as silicon wafers and glass28–30, their designs are often optimized for only a specific type of surface (e.g., smooth, rough, or irregular). For instance, to adapt to rough surfaces, researchers adjust the stiffness of microfiber arrays. For example, by using high-aspect-ratio or hierarchical structures to reduce the equivalent elastic modulus, or by incorporating heterogeneous materials to construct composite features such as core-shell31–33 or stiffness-gradient architectures34–38, thereby increasing the actual contact area. For macroscopically irregular surfaces (e.g., curved or inclined surfaces), a common approach is to introduce phase-change materials into the backing layer of the adhesive structure17,39–41. Through external field modulation such as photothermal, magnetic, or pneumatic actuation, the stiffness can be temporally varied, softening upon contact and stiffening during detachment. However, in practical grasping tasks, targ (...truncated)