World's Smallest Robotic Hand

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."

Comments

Finally!

[Frogbert]

Finally something small enough to massage my... never mind.

Re:Finally!

[R2.0]

DAMN IT! Dammit, dammit,dammit,dammit,dammit!

I HATE whn someone steals my jokes.

Do you perhaps live within 70 miles of me? Can I borrow a pickaxe handle?

Yes, but...

[salec]

can it play the world's smallest violin?

I Wonder

[PixieDust]

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?

Smaller hand

[coke_scp]

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

Waldo

[seanellis]

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!

Re:Waldo

[DMorritt]

found ... oh no wait thats not him ...

Re:That hardly qualifies as a 'hand'

[Silver Sloth]

Maybe you need to expand your imagination more - or relax your difinition of a hand. Very few functional, as opposed to recreational, robots look humanoid. We are well evolved (but not designed!) for doing what humans do but that doesn't mean the humanoid shape is appropriate for every solution.

I bet it doesn't say 'Danger Will Robinson either'!

not much to do

[Rulke]

I don't know, looks like it can't do much more then grab and hold.. Maybe build it into traps for rats and mice... the hand would grab their balls... and neuter them. Would that be considered a humane trap? atleast they aren't killed :)

Re:In the real world....

[BuzzSkyline]

Microsurgery? Lab-on-a-chip processing? Little assembly lines where the robot hand gently grabs an ovum, fertilizes it with the help of another little hand, and moves it to the nursery where we grow clones to take over the world? Just a thought.

Re:Oblig...

[gykh]

Could be very handy.

Just perfect for the digital age.

Who cares?

[Symp0sium]

I want to see the worlds smallest robotic foot!

Deceptive video?

[Ancient_Hacker]

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.

Re:Deceptive video?

[jellomizer]

1. I would think speed. I Bet this thing runs very slowly and that took probably 10-15 minutes to do.
2. They didn't get that part to work yet.

Re:What is it with...

[pookemon]

Oh well then - a creepy gif is something different... ;)

There's plenty of room at the bottom.

[TerranFury]

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

This is actually an idea described by Feynman in his lecture 'There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom,' for which he is often cited as being the first to explore the idea of nanotechnology.

The text is available here.

I'll quote a little of the applicable bit:

[...]

Now comes the interesting question: How do we make such a tiny mechanism? I leave that to you. However, let me suggest one weird possibility. You know, in the atomic energy plants they have materials and machines that they can't handle directly because they have become radioactive. To unscrew nuts and put on bolts and so on, they have a set of master and slave hands, so that by operating a set of levers here, you control the ``hands'' there, and can turn them this way and that so you can handle things quite nicely.

[...]

Now, I want to build much the same device---a master-slave system which operates electrically. But I want the slaves to be made especially carefully by modern large-scale machinists so that they are one-fourth the scale of the ``hands'' that you ordinarily maneuver. So you have a scheme by which you can do things at one- quarter scale anyway---the little servo motors with little hands play with little nuts and bolts; they drill little holes; they are four times smaller. Aha! So I manufacture a quarter-size lathe; I manufacture quarter-size tools; and I make, at the one-quarter scale, still another set of hands again relatively one-quarter size! This is one-sixteenth size, from my point of view. And after I finish doing this I wire directly from my large-scale system, through transformers perhaps, to the one-sixteenth-size servo motors. Thus I can now manipulate the one-sixteenth size hands.

Well, you get the principle from there on. [...]

Re:Now that they have the millimeter version...

[Laur]

They're going to write an error message in German using very small pens?