The man climbed onto an 8-meter glass wall using a device modeled on a gecko's paws.

Tropical lizards geckos have a unique structure of legs, which allows them to run on the walls and ceilings of any material as easily as on the surface of the earth. The goal of the DARPA Z-man program is to create climbing equipment based on the same principles as the gecko's foot. On June 5, DARPA reported on the first significant success of this program - a person, whose weight together with a payload was 122 kg, climbed and descended a sheer glass wall 7.6 meters high. For the military, this technology is valuable in that it greatly expands the capabilities of soldiers, especially in urban combat conditions. In peaceful life, all the variety of applications of such a “super scotch”, which adheres tightly to any surface and at the same time easily comes off, leaving no traces, it is difficult even to imagine.

Scientists for a long time could not reveal the secret of geckos. On their paws there are no glands that produce adhesives, no suckers, or claws. They run freely both on rough and absolutely smooth surfaces. They easily hold the weight of their entire body on one foot. A gecko can stick and stick off a foot up to 15 times per second.

How does the gecko foot work? Its surface is covered with a set of folds, each of which has a set of the thinnest bristles with a length of 0.1 mm, and at the end of each bristle there are several hundred branches, each of which ends with a triangular spatula just 200 nm wide. Billions of these shovels are adjacent to the surface, on which the gecko runs, so close that between them van der Waals forces of intermolecular attraction begin to act. They manifest themselves only at close contact and in normal conditions are negligible. The unique structure of the gecko's legs increases the area of ​​close contact with the surface by many orders of magnitude. The bristles and spatulas of the gecko are arranged in such a way that by pulling them at a certain angle, you can easily tear them away from the surface. In other directions, they remain firmly stuck to it.


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Attempts to create an artificial analogue of the gecko's feet have been made for a long time. A few years ago, a Stickybot robot was developed using this principle. Also in many laboratories in the world are developing " gecko tape ", which can carry a very large weight. The complexity of creating climbing equipment is that it must simultaneously hold large loads (the weight of a typical gecko does not exceed 100–200 grams, three orders of magnitude less than the weight of the climber with a load) and, in contrast to tape, withstand many cycles of sticking without noticeable degradation. It is this result that scientists from the Cambridge Draper Laboratory, who are conducting this development for DARPA, managed to achieve.