Enabled by hierarchical structures on their feet, Geckos have the ability to traverse rough, smooth, vertical or inverted surfaces. Inspired by this great feat, C. Greiner et al. developed arnsynthetic, fully reversible, switchable adhesive. This biomimetic system provides a mechanism for decreasing adhesion using a magnetic field to actuate nickel cantilevers which are coated with aligned vertical polymeric nanorods. When subjected to a magnetic field, the nickel paddles rotate. This rotation conceals the nanostructures on the paddle surface and therefore greatly reduces the available surface area, leading to an adhesion decreased by a factor of 40. Compared to approaches based on shape memory polymers, the complete reversibility, which allows the switching of adhesion countless times, is the main advantage of this biomimetic approach. Further improving this system in terms of the absolute adhesion strength will lead to a full range of applications.
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