Bioinspired field-controlled adhesion: Mechanisms, design strategies and applications

Animals have evolved over millions of years to support locomotion, attachment, and stable residence across diverse surfaces, offering rich biomimetic models for developing artificial interfaces with controllable adhesion and friction. Inspired by these biological mechanisms, extensive efforts have been devoted to enhancing adhesive and frictional performance under complex environmental and interfacial conditions. Beyond strengthening adhesion, achieving controllable attachment and detachment is increasingly crucial for expanding the practical applications of bioinspired attachment systems. Diverse external energy fields and field-responsive materials have been explored to enable reversible, and programmable regulation of interfacial physicochemical interactions. Field-controll adhesion therefore marks a paradigm shift from passive structural replication to active functional modulation. This review summarizes recent advances in varied field-responsive adhesive systems, with a focus on their regulatory mechanisms, stimulus fields, and responsive materials. It further discusses key challenges in interfacial adaptability, adhesion reversibility, and scalable fabrication, and outlines future directions for designing and translating next-generation programmable smart adhesive interfaces.