How Does a Robot Gripper Pick Up Things?

More fun facts

• Some robot grippers do not squeeze at all; they stick to things the way a gecko's feet do.
• Scientists at Stanford University and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory built these gecko grippers.
• Under a microscope, the gripper pad looks like a forest of tiny, sharp wedges.
• When the pad lightly touches something, only the very tips touch, so most of the time it is not sticky.
• Pushing on the pad in just the right way bends its tiny hairs, and that turns the stickiness on.
• When the push relaxes, the hairs stand back up and the stickiness turns off, so the gripper lets go.
• The weak pull that makes this work is called van der Waals force, which also helps real geckos climb.
• NASA astronaut Victor Glover tested a gecko gripper on Honey, one of the flying Astrobee robots on the International Space Station.

Sources: Stanford, NASA, NASA