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NASA's Astronaut Glove Design Competition
FleaPlus writes "NASA's Centennial Challenges program has announced its latest prize contest, the Astronaut Glove Challenge. The competition, a collaboration between NASA and the non-profit Volanz Aerospace, will be held in late 2006 and will award $250K to the team which produces the best-performing glove within contest parameters. The basic idea was originally proposed last year on Rand Simberg's Transterrestrial Musings blog to improve on current gloves, which have difficulties with remaining flexible while maintaining constant internal pressure in the vacuum of space. Previously-announced competitions include prizes for superstrong tethers, beaming power, and extracting oxygen from lunar regolith. These prizes are intended to lay the groundwork for larger competitions to further NASA's Vision for Space Exploration, possibly including 'an eight-figure prize for the first privately developed robotic moon lander.'"
One of the solutions to this is building a robotic glove that helps muscle movement using signals detected from nerves (previosly posted on slashdot for the whole body).
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Do away with a full suit and go with a tank top and shorts suit complete with space flip flops?
:-(
They can't quite do that, but they can get pretty darn close. The Space Activity Suit (aka: skinsuit) was a project to produce a spacesuit that was exposed to hard vacuum. The idea was that the human body is actually pretty good at maintaining its shape, so all you need is a bit of tight spandex to apply a pressure to the wearer, and a helmet to provide eye protection and a breathing apparatus. The suit itself would have pores in it, allowing the astronaut to actually *feel* what he's working on.
Sadly, the idea wasn't pursued despite encouraging results.
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Honestly, what would happen if an astronaut just stuck his naked arm out from an airlock into outer space?
A common misbelief is that it would either instantly freeze or explode.
Space is a complete vaccuum, just like the kind in thermos bottles, and it's a VERY good thermal insulant. If your arm is at 37C, and you stick it in the best insulant possible, it will remain at 37C.
Now, the pressure inside your arm is one atmosphere, and the pressure outside is zero, so gases would begin to want to exit your arm, liquids will slowly turn to gases, tissues would expand, yes, but NOT EXPLOSIVELY.
Have you seen 2001: A Space Odyssey? At one point an astronaut jumps from a repair pod to an airlock without an helmet and survives just fine, which is perfectly realistic. The greatest worry is actually all the radiation that outer space is bathed in.
So for the glove design, a basic glove would an impermable layer and on top of that a metallic layer to block the radiations. It would, however, get hot very quick, so a cooling system becomes necessary for extended work outside. But a basic glove can be paper thin, because vaccuum is more harmless than you might think.
It seems like the big problem with the gloves is maintaining ability to move easily and with dexterity while containing air against the vacuum of space. Would it be possible to make a glove that has no air between the glove and the skin, and therefore doesn't need pressure containment? The glove would need to provide insulation against cold. To do that it could have a closed-cell insulator that's vacuum-capable, or it could even have some active electric heating. The glove also has to provide a barrier to prevent water (in the hand) from boiling/freezing/sublimating, which it seems like an insulating barrier would do. Would any of this work, or does the whole thing have to be pressurized and pressure-capable?
As far as protection and flexibility go, these are problems that have been faced here in Earth with motorcycle gloves. Two of the more extreme "gauntlet" style product families are from Icon and the Teknic.
The design requirements here are, of course, to allow the rider the agility to operate motorcycle controls - and to protect the hand and fingers against hitting the road at high speed.
In space it's more about protection from heat extremes and against handling sharp objects (possibly exposed metal edges) in a vacuum where puncture resistance is very important.
Anyway, those types of designs might give budding space glove designers pause for thought and inspiration for a starting point. I particularly like the idea of a shell - I figure that a hard articulated structure could help solve the inflation pressure vs movability issue, it could also be spring-loaded to help counteract the effects of inflating to atmospheric pressure. Think of it as building an armored and multi-layered jointed exoskeleton for the hand.
At the risk of sounding silly and with my hubris level ratched up real high? I'd like to suggest a couple alternatives which might be combined.
1. Mittens (less work I think per finger, more room for heating/cooling lines, less fabric and surface area). Also, enough surface area to be able to bind magnetically to tools maybe, and everyone knows mittens are warmer.
2. Robotic waldo claws, titanium and plastic hand simulacra and radical tentacles (as another poster also recommended waldos). Keeping the hand inside the end of the arm with a metal/rubber waldo attached to the outside (making your arms a bit longer basically) would have some definite advantages. First, you don't have to worry about puncturing your glove, you can get more strength into the waldo than your muscles provide, no pressure to work against, could be controlled by someone else, you could have more than two waldos coming out of your suit (either you multitask between them or you get someone to operate others), they could be shaped like tentacles or wrenches or whatever is best for space work, you can use materials best for space work without having to worry about bendability, temperature, or radiation protection, and you can use very thin or tiny waldo elements scaled down from your hand for tiny places, with mechanical aids adding precision (i.e. lock to an axis, etc.). Finally, consider that while you could just imagine having a single metal hand stuck at the end of a lengthened arm, looking like a deep sea diver's suit, it is also possible to imagine a plasticine hand virtually identical to that of man, but made with titanium bones and superplastic muscles. Considering that evolution and our brains have gotten this far with the current design, it may be best to simply use the same design but beef it up for outer space. If well integrated with the astronaut with advanced haptics technology, it could become like a "ghost hand" and very intuitive to use with fine control. Lastly, about those tentacles. Well yes, space anime does make good use of tentacles, and Doctor Octopus likes them, but I'm thinking that outer space might indeed be like the deep sea in that a large number of highly deformable tentacles could be extremely useful, if the mental barriers to efficient control can be overcome. Certainly it could be possible to mimic a hand with a bundle of fine tentacles, but I am mainly thinking about being able to grip and hold in place multiple large objects, hold oneself down so you don't float away when you try to screw something down, etc. If you could imagine yourself to be more of a fanciful creature from the undersea world than a landlubber biped, you might be able to imagine some improvements. Personally I like the idea of a utility tentacle that will grab onto secured parts to steady you when you are about to float away, and perhaps a couple additional ones that you can use to orient one or two parts in relation to your body while you are working on them.
3. muscle magnification. As someone said was posted earlier which I didn't know. If you have motors in your gloves they could detect where your are trying to move it and then supply more strength. Apparently the original post mentioned nerve signal sensing though I don't know if that's necessary. Also, use of memory metal and other active materials might be useful, and maybe a glove that makes it easier to (ratchet) close than open might be possible.
A combination of the above ideas might be useful, for example if you have a mitten and pull out the area between thumb and fingers to make it a convex box (maybe narrowing wrist to maintain pressure), you can then freely move your fingers and wrist to control a waldo. The movement of the hand could in fact be sensed by laser scanners built into the glove interior, possibly augmented if needed for precision work by having the astronaut first put on a silk glove with barcode-like patterns all over it and a non-slip interior coating. For manhandling big heavy things, coping with tiny things, or makin