DARPA under the program demonstrated Z-Man lifting man glass wall using gloves that mimic gecko feet. Development of Velcro, which allows crawl on walls like "Spider-Man" , conducted by Americans for several years.
Fellow U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), weighing about 98 kg with an additional load of 23 kg rose to a height of 25 meters without the use of climbing equipment, except gloves with microstructured polymer coating developed at Draper Laboratory, Cambridge (Mass.). This is stated on the official website of DARPA.
Climbing gear does not fundamentally changed for a long time. The main tools for lifting are still rope and ladder.
State Agency DARPA, which traditionally deals with military developments, launched a program Z-Man to create biologically inspired gear for climbing vertical surfaces of conventional building materials.
Because the best climbers in the animal world are geckos, it was decided to take an example from them. Nature does not get used - it has long been an object copy. These lizards can creep up on a variety of surfaces, including smooth, thanks to the suction cups on the feet.
Lifting force allowing the gecko sucker keep his body hanging on one finger. Finger gecko consists of tiny bristles length of 100 microns and a radius of 2 microns. Each bristle, in turn, is formed a hundred other brushes diameter of about 200 nanometers, which literally adhered to the surface.
For attachment to smooth vertical surfaces new gloves, as well as gecko, using the van der Waals forces. People, of course, heavier gecko. One of the first challenges faced by researchers in the process of creating a glove-suckers was scaling. If an ordinary gecko weighs 200 grams, the average person - 75 pounds. Man was able to move across the surface as well as a lizard, it requires sufficient bonding strength. DARPA for this increased surface area of the glove.
Currently gloves with synthetic fabric look like flattened pillows that are not quite comfortable to use. But we should not forget that this is one of the first versions of the product. In the future, for sure there will be more advanced models.