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World's Smallest Robotic Hand

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the smell-like-cabbage dept.

BuzzSkyline writes "The world's smallest robotic hand has been built by Yen-Wen Lu and Chang-Jin "CJ" Kim at UCLA's Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department. The microhand can make a fist that can grasp objects smaller than a millimeter across. Check out the freaky video on the researchers' website of the microhand grabbing a blob that looks like a fish egg. The tiny hand is made of inert materials, making it ideal for handling gooey biological samples. Lu and Kim describe their microhand in a paper published October 16 in the journal Applied Physics Letters."

4 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. I Wonder by PixieDust · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Could this application be used for repairing internals of machinery? Perhaps in Zero G environments?

    Consider a system that constantly monitors internal systems (that's already in place). A problem is identified, and a swarm of robotic workers immediately moves out to fix the problem. Could this be ther first step to a sort of nanite repair system?

  2. Smaller hand by coke_scp · · Score: 2, Interesting

    IINAMHS, but the world's smallest hand be used to build a yet smaller hand?

  3. Waldo by seanellis · · Score: 4, Interesting

    10 posts and no-one's mentioned "Waldo" yet?

    From Wikipedia (Waldo (short story)):

    A typical illustration of the tools in the story is when Waldo needs to do micro-dissection on the scale of cellular walls. He uses human-sized waldos to make smaller waldos, then those to make even smaller waldos, and continues the series until he has some small enough to work at the cellular scale. It doesn't occur to him to use conventional fabrication techniques to skip straight down to the smallest size.

    The primary application for these hands is obvious: build even smaller ones!

    --
    Sean Ellis
    Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
  4. Deceptive video? by Ancient_Hacker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hmm, a few questions for these guys:

    (1) Why is the "video" not a video, but just a few stills?
    (2) Why does the video not show the "hand" letting go of the object?

    A cynical person might suspect

    (1) The "video" was selected from a larger sequence, some frames of which might not show the hand acting so gracefully.

    (2) They didnt show the hand letting go of an object because they havent figured out how to undo the effects of surface tension, which spell doom for nano-manipulators.

    When they show the "hand" in full-frame unedited video, picking up and letting go of several objects, then maybe they'll have some credibility.