Nanotech Research Works Toward Artificial Muscles

An anonymous reader writes "Nanotech researchers are developing artificial muscles that convert chemical energy to mechanical energy. This ambitious project aims at making an artificial muscles from conducting polymers and carbon nanotubes that are chemically powered, like natural muscles, and exceed the force generation, contraction and speed of their natural counterpart. This work will lead to advanced limbs for amputees and robots."

Comments

Super strong muscles

[nizo]

...exceed the force generation, contraction and speed of their natural counterpart.

Strong muscles without the need to exercise. Sounds like a geek's dream come true huh? Except that one must keep in mind certain dangly appendages that could be torn off if you aren't careful with those new bulging biceps. And what about joints, could they handle the extra stress of markedly increased muscle strength? Like you go to pick up your car and your arms pop out of their sockets. Ouch.

Re:Super strong muscles

[scheme]

And what about joints, could they handle the extra stress of markedly increased muscle strength? Like you go to pick up your car and your arms pop out of their sockets.

Which is why the next step is obviously artifical bones, ligaments, and tendons.

Re:Super strong muscles

[ScrewMaster]

Not just the lubrication: bone is a living material. But still ... electric motors with sealed oillite bearings operate for decades without maintenance. Of course, they don't have to withstand the tremendous peak forces that articulated joints do.

I suspect there are probably a number of materials that would serve reliably in a replacement joint if they didn't have to function within the human body. Tissue rejection is a major issue, and that limits what you can put in there. Plus which human tissue is hardly chemically neutral, so I suppose you'd have to worry about corrosive effects as well. Titanium is used a lot (my Dad's pacemaker was made of the stuff) and is one of the few substances that isn't affected much by the environment of the body and doesn't trigger an autoimmune reaction. Or so his doctor told me.

Re:Super strong muscles

[AmberBlackCat]

Strong muscles without the need to exercise. Sounds like a geek's dream come true huh?

I think men who paid for the super muscles instead of working out (and didn't have any missing limbs in the first place) would just be a laughingstock to people like me. They would be like girls who get their fathers to pay $3000 for them to get increasingly large breasts. A guy who had a much smaller body might be more appealing just for being more real.

For people with less than two arms and two legs, this sounds good. I just hope it's used to help them and not used for military purposes.

Another interesting thought, imagine if these things could be combined with nanomachines that are able to build the muscle material. The muscles could be programmed to get bigger, or programmed to automatically repair themselves. Large plastic breasts could never do that.

But the name...

[Omega Leader-(P12)]

Myomer. It must be called Myomer.

Really?

[Hodr]

"This work will lead to advanced limbs for amputees and robots." But not necessarily in that order..

Re:Really?

[Olix]

What about a secret group of government super agents, Deus Ex Style? Thats always been my secret dream. That and being an Albino.

What about implants?

[millennial]

Yes, I'm odd. This is the first thing that came to my mind. What if someone wanted to add a limb? I'm pretty sure it could be possible. We could construct a framework of artificial bone, build the artificial muscles and tendons, implant artificial nerves, and (much like when a person gets a limb transplant) graft it into the nervous system.

I'm no expert in this field - I'm merely speculating. Feel free to totally bash my idea. Is this even possible, though?

Re:What about implants?

[CAIMLAS]

Your nervous system is not like your average computer, where you can swap out one component (say, a 2-bus RAID card) and put another one in (a 4-bus card).

Your nervous system is intricately linked to every other part of your body: bones, muscles, balance, brain, immune system, skin - you name it. It has also grown with you for your entire life, adapting to the minute changes that take place throughout your body's growing and aging process. It subtly adapts to these changes. When a person grows too quickly, their nervous system often suffers. I know of a man that grew a full foot in a single year of his adolescence, and as a result his nervous system has given him a permanent "tick", resulting in him never being able to hold his hands steady (as someone shooting a gun, operating sensitive machinery, or performing an operation would require). Many people have varrying degrees of this 'unsteadyness' due to their rate of growth, as well.

I imagine that if you were to actually be able to graft an artificial limb in place, it would still function much like a phantom limb - and that's if it's a proper replacement limb, not an 'extra' limb. I'd think an extra limb(s) would completely throw off a person's internal ballance ("chi", or whatever you want to call it), resulting in the limb being - at best - a clumsy, yet strong, piece of baggage.

No, replacement or additional limbs probably aren't the fields of intended use of this technology - not for a good long time. The more immediate application of this technology is to use it for military purposes: mechanized infantry, at its finest. Forget tanks - a single 6', 240lb man, fully encased in a body suit would completely dominate against our modern "mechanized infantry". Aside from having immense lifting and movement advantages, they'd also probably have reactive armor and a full compliment (think: weapons locker) of weapons. Reactive armor, rocket launchers, built-in navigation systems, several thousand rounds of ammunition for an automatic rifle, half a dozen different supplimentary round types (grenade launcher, explosive rounds, armor-penetrating rounds, etc.), and God knows what else.

Re:What about implants?

[ikkonoishi]

Actually the brain is remarably plastic when dealing with new inputs and outputs.

For instance this little experiment.

Re:What about implants?

[danila]

The problem is that many people have a very strong immune system in their brain. Just like we have leucocytes in our bloodstream protecting us from bacteria and viruses that our body deems harmful, those people have militant memocytes in their brain protecting them from new ideas and possibilities.

Come other to your grandma and ask what she thinks about adding a 3rd arm to a person so that he can be more productive at work, more proficient in his hobby, for aesthetical reasons or so that he can masturbate while groping his girlfriend's tits. :) No offence if you have a counterculture hippy grandma that is heavily in bodymods, but I bet an average person would be strongly averse to the idea of extra limbs.

This all can be very well structured in terms of Future Shock Levels as put forward by Eliezer Yudkowsky. "A Shock Level measures the high-tech concepts you can contemplate without being impressed, frightened, blindly enthusiastic - without exhibiting future shock." He suggests 5 levels (quoting):

• SL0: The legendary average person is comfortable with modern technology - not so much the frontiers of modern technology, but the technology used in everyday life. Most people, TV anchors, journalists, politicians.
  
• SL1: Virtual reality, living to be a hundred, "The Road Ahead", "To Renew America", "Future Shock", the frontiers of modern technology as seen by Wired magazine. Scientists, novelty-seekers, early-adopters, programmers, technophiles.
  
• SL2: Medical immortality, interplanetary exploration, major genetic engineering, and new ("alien") cultures. The average SF fan.
  
• SL3: Nanotechnology, human-equivalent AI, minor intelligence enhancement, uploading, total body revision, intergalactic exploration. Extropians and transhumanists.
  
• SL4: The Singularity, Jupiter Brains, Powers, complete mental revision, ultraintelligence, posthumanity, Alpha-Point computing, Apotheosis, the total evaporation of "life as we know it." Singularitarians and not much else.

Speaking of implants, an SL0 person is probably comfortable with replacing a bone or a joint. SL1 is ok with artificial limbs for those who have something happen with the originals. SL2 would not mind replacing perfectly good natural hands. SL3 would agree with going away with the humanness requirement for the body and just using something that suits the task well. And an SL4 accepts we don't need a body at all.

So what you are suggesting is completely impossible today and perfectly possible in the medium-term (10-50 years). However the reaction to your proposal is not determined by the feasibility of the idea, but by the population of anti-memes in the brain of the listener.

Artificial muscle == holy grail

[Roland Piquepaille]

Scientists have been researching artificial muscles for decades now. The need for linear actuators with fast response times, almost friction-free force-less movements and power varying as a function of their lengths, is great.

The best they could come up with for powerful movements is this pneumatic device, which is a braided sleeve with a rubber balloon inside: when the balloone expands, it pulls the fibers in the braided sleeve apart, and therefore the overall length of the device shrinks and the device fattens. When the pressure is let off, the device becomes long and thin.

Re:We're on our way...

[confusion]

Gotta start off small, you know. That way they can milk all the money from releasing USB1, then USB2, then firewire, then....

Jerry http://www.syslog.org/

We can rebuild him..

[MrFlannel]

We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first Bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better . . . stronger . . . faster.

This is Great for Baseball

[syntap]

Now the zillionaires don't have to take steroids to cheat! And they can afford to be early-adopters of muscle upgrade procedures!

This sig is my best one.

What happens to...

[zwilliams07]

those muscle heads when they start pumping iron and they hit an Insufficient Memory error?

mnb Re:Super strong muscles

[Anonymous Coward]

My truck is currently on jackstands.
The four of them combined have less surface area contacting my driveway than one of my Euro sized 45 shoes.

Re:mnb Re:Super strong muscles

[kesuki]

Grand parent could have been assuming you were standing on the grass, or could have been referring to your shoes... however you're entirely correct, concrete and asphault can easily withstand the psi of a person picking up even a bus... you don't run into a problem with ground deformation (beneath asphault) until you exceed 40 tons/Sq inch so, unless you're picking up a 400 ton dump truck, you're not at issue with PSI ratings. oh hey, and if you want to walk without deforming the ground a solid inch of tempered steel will do for single, loaded 400 ton truck, but you'd need titanium to handle a loaded 400 ton truck in EACH hand. (this assumes of course your bones are made of solid titanium, and your tendons are made of carbon nanotubes)

Sounds more realistic

[karvind]

This project sounds more realistic and well thought out than the Space elevator dream.

Few issues which still need to be resolved:

(a) How to place and grow nanotubes precisely ? Even after 14 years we struggle with that.

(b) How does carbon nanotube interacts with biology in human body ? What are the side effects ?

(c) Need to find an easy way of making conducting vs semiconducting nanotubes.

(d) Fuel cell efficiency. They have only said that they can convert the chemical energy to mechanical energy, but how well ?

(e) Ethical issue: This may not be a big deal if that person with artificial limbs can generate 100 times more force with no effort and break anyone's neck. But I am sure once we start augmenting human brain with more computational power (may be carbon nanotubes are faster than neurons, use them !!), then we may have to rethink !!

Basic Mechanics

[Baldrson]

While the carbon nanotube muscles can exceed the performance of natural muscle by generating a hundred times the force and elongating twice as fast, the contraction is less than one-tenth that of natural muscle. The conducting polymer muscles provide similar contractions to natural muscles, but have neither high cycle life nor high energy conversion efficiencies. The goal of the DARPA-funded program is to eliminate these problems and convert from electrically powered to chemically powered artificial muscles.

It seems these guys haven't heard of the way you convert force to distance and vis versa.

It's called the "leverage" and its used in everything from simple levers to pully systems.

Re:Basic Mechanics

[SpeleoNut]

Muscles do contract lengthwise but the force at the molecular level is driven by a lever arm, namley myosin. As such, all of the muscle filaments stay the same length and do not contract merely "slide" over each other.

Amputees and SOLDIERS!

[Colgate2003]

The real driving force behind this research is the desire for a nano-enabled soldier of the future. They hope to use these as exo-muscles in combat suits to allow soldiers to literally "leap tall buildings in a single bound."

The MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies is working on this right now, but they don't see it being available for use for 30 years or so. I recently attended a lecture at MIT entitled "Nanotechnology: From Promise to Profitablility" that was almost entirely focused on military applications.

Amputees will certainly benefit, but that's not why the money is there for this research...

Re:Amputees and SOLDIERS!

[foniksonik]

And this surprises you somehow?

Nearly every major leap in technology in every discipline has been funded for and by the US military.

After the fact it is commercialized and improved upon so as to become a consumer attractive product, meaning smaller, more energy efficient and less buggy... iteratively over several generations so that by the time we see it it doesn't look anything like the original.

The latest trend is for the military to start buying these cheaper more efficient versions from commercial suppliers... but the original tech is still developed early by the military and military contractors/university programs.

Re:We're on our way...

[Nik Picker]

until Ganny 1.0 gets her hip and wrist updates to 3.0 and then its a whole new ball game in the walmart january sales.. .

picture the scene, you tentatively consider that new purchase so marvellously reduced in price when a voice cracks out behind you ....

"move away from that sale counter sonny, put down the sale item and stand away from the counter. You have 10 seconds to comply..."

yes its Granny 209 , shes armed and dangerous...

Triple Strength Myomer

[Mukaikubo]

Plus, this stuff is just the thing for helping me bury the hatchet in the cockpit of an annoying Jenner.

Other Important Benefits

[richardmilhousnixon]

I've been working with technology similar to this for the past year at University of Washington. I think a lot of people are overlooking some of the most important benefits of this type of actuator. Robustness is a very critical aspect of any mechanical device. With current hydraulics and pneumatics, a small dent or bend will render the entire device unusable. With an artificial muscle, half the device could be ripped off and it could still function with a limited capacity.

Imagine a hydraulic actuator on a modern plane for instance. It would be nice to be able to still be able to control the aircraft's ailerons, flaps, rudder, and elevator even if significant damage occured to mechanical components.

That's one of the biggest differences between man and man-made machines. People can be injured and keep going (watch any Arnold movie). A machine, on the other hand, is pretty much all or nothing (except in Arnold movies).

Re:Other Important Benefits

[jdgeorge]

That's one of the biggest differences between man and man-made machines. People can be injured and keep going (watch any Arnold movie). A machine, on the other hand, is pretty much all or nothing (except in Arnold movies).

After I learn all about biology by watching Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Total Recall", I plan to learn all about space travel by watching Bruce Willis in "Armageddon".

What?

[isny]

No comments about modding your Real Doll (or robot girlfriend, etc.)? Get with it, people!

The First Step...

[potpie]

Has anybody read the Space Odyssey series? I don't remember which book it's in, but Arthur Clarke once talks about the history of the creators of the black boxes. They were a normal civilization that became extremely advanced and eventually built large ships that could take them all over the universe. But they could also incorporate the mechanics and electronics into themselves, and incorporate (from the latin "corpus, corporis, n." meaning body: particularly effective in this sense!) themselves into their machines until eventually, they were their own machines, constantly improving upon themselves. It goes on to explain that they were able to transcend matter entirely and exist in a way we cannot quite comprehend.

Also, in the book 3001, Clarke predicts braincap machines that add the abilities of a computer to whoever wears them.

I for one welcome the new experience of becoming the overlords of the universe. How long until we can transcend matter and build conscienceness-inspiring black boxes?

Neuromorphic tail

[FleaPlus]

Check out these folks, who put together a prehensile robotic tail. The apparatus registers EMG signals from skin electrodes and uses them to control the tail.

Advanced Limbs For Amputees

[SuperGillies]

I for one welcome our new paraplegic overlords.

Imagine the new spam

[syntap]

I'm sure this can be twisted to somehow upset v|agr@ as the top spam subject.

My best sig is this one.

Amputees only?

[tedrlord]

I guess this means that I'm going to have to find a nice lumber mill to work in, preferably one with a really good health plan. Actually, I should probably wait until they figure out adamantium.