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Scientists Have Built Robot Muscles That Can Lift 1,000 Times Their Own Weight (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute and MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) announced today (Nov. 27) that they've created robotic "muscles" that can lift up to 1,000 times their own weight. The simple objects are constructed out of metal or plastic "skeletons" that are covered in either a liquid or air, and then sealed in plastic or fabric "skins." The muscle pulls taught when a vacuum is created inside the skin, and goes slack when the vacuum is released. By folding the skeletons in different ways, the vacuum can pull the muscle in different directions. "Vacuum-based muscles have a lower risk of rupture, failure, and damage, and they don't expand when they're operating, so you can integrate them into closer-fitting robots on the human body," Daniel Vogt, a research engineer at the Wyss Institute, said in a release.
These new structures are also surprisingly cheap. As they don't require anything other than water or air to move them, the researchers told Harvard that a single muscle can be built in about 10 minutes, for less than $1. (Obviously, there'd still be a cost for the vacuum or whatever is being used to change the pressure of the muscles.)
These new structures are also surprisingly cheap. As they don't require anything other than water or air to move them, the researchers told Harvard that a single muscle can be built in about 10 minutes, for less than $1. (Obviously, there'd still be a cost for the vacuum or whatever is being used to change the pressure of the muscles.)
... or in 30 years after Boston Dynamics patents expire and we have the reasonably sized fusion reactors that we've been promised for like 50 years...
I don't want my army of killer robots going limp the moment you decide to escape into space.
The catch is they only weigh 2 nanograms. Silly "scientists".
'Scientists' rediscover flexible pneumatics.
For about the thousandth time.
I wonder when they will discover they can use a lever to increase for force applied!
Perhaps also something round to allow the device to smoothly move over the ground!
Patents expire after 20 years.
Nobody promised you a fusion reactor. That was the moron talking head on the TV not understanding the story.
Only a dollar, not counting all of the other expenses required to exploit the technique in anything resembling a reliable, portable, battery-feasible practical application.
My SUV runs on lug nuts and body panel rivets that only cost pennies each to manufacture!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I'm sure these vacuum muscles are great. The paper is actually very nice and exceptionally detailed. I really could not ask for more, technically. My problem is with the "built for $1 in 10 minutes" part of this being included in a scientific paper (although buried in Table S3 in the supplement).
I am a scientist. I know how this works. "Scientific" conclusions require support through data, modeling, or citation in the text. Then there are the statements presented as fact, but are actually put there to get funding or attention. This "$1" statement is one of those. It's lazy, misleading, and bad science.
Cost is a quantitative metric, an easily measured value. Give us the actual cost. How much was spent? How many did you make? That number makes a lot of scientists uncomfortable, there's a lot of developmental costs associated with that... but it's honest.
Quoting vague times and estimates of minimal material doesn't incorporate equipment, training, and expertise required to make something. This was a problem with a promising paper based microfluidics project I reviewed (also DARPA funded) a few years ago. It turns out there was one guy in the lab who could actually make some of the chemicals required, and he wasn't able to effectively transfer that knowledge to anyone else for many years. It doesn't matter what something is made of or how quick it is to make; if only one person in a team of PhDs can make the process work, it's not going to be cheap any time soon (maybe one day...). So while the cost quoted in the literature for the devices was pennies, millions of dollars was spent on (failed) training that was not accounted for.
If you really want to show that you have something manufacturable without actually doing manufacturing, have an intern manufacture widgets for you for a while. Keep track of training and oversight time as well as yield rates and scrap material, and use all that to report projected costs.
(Obviously, there'd still be a cost for the vacuum or whatever is being used to change the pressure of the muscles.)
But if we use up all our vacuum on robot muscles, when future generations look for vacuum they'll find nothing! That would really suck!
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OK, if you want to read a story you'll never be able to forget, read about the little girl that was eviscerated by the suction of a pool filter and the action of her somewhat dense mommy. Or, on second thought, don't read that. It's too nasty.
There are risks to high suction next to the human body. Especially sick and weak ones.
Bruce Perens.
The disadvantage of basing it on vacuum pressure is that their force is limited to ambient pressure. For sea level that's 14.7 PSI, or about 10 Newtons per square cm of muscle cross sectional area. The typical human muscle can pull with a force of about 35 N/cm^2. So these artificial muscles are considerably weaker than biological muscles. Sorry all you Mechwarrior fans.
It might turn out to be useful in underwater applications. Pressure underwater increases by 1 atmosphere approximately every 10 meters of depth, so it wouldn't take much depth to greatly exceed human musclepower. The problem might actually be being able to pull a vacuum under those pressures.
Incidentally, air pressure is also what they use to make zero-g weightlifting exercise equipment.
Taut.
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Microsoft.
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Slow and fragile BUT light, low-cost and easy to manufacture.
There has to be applications where those features are preferred over stronger/faster/more robust.
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Just in case this isn't clear to everyone and even by forgetting about different aspects highly constraining what/how can be lifted, note that an equivalent resisting force is required to help during the process and keep it up. If you rely on air, you would need to carry a mass of air equivalent to what you would be lifting. That's why the typical robo-exoskeleton shown in movies allowing a random person to lift 1 ton is plainly impossible: that person would have to provide most of the required force reacting to that ton.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
They don't have to be chemically-driven, but at the very least a muscle should be a self-contained unit. If you have to have a central pump (vacuum, hydraulic, etc) it's not a muscle, it's a piston. The difference is that a muscle is something you can stick in place and just need a power source to drive, whereas a piston requires that thing plus the power source plus some kind of transformer (in this case electric to pnumatic) to operate and is in turn much heavier, noisier, etc.
Well done MIT, you've invented the piston.
Just asking,
Does that x1000 include the weight of the vaccum?
Elok
This tech would be useful in a high-radiation environment.
But there are better fluids, and these will see use in larger, serious applications.
Then the fun begins.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Patents expire after 20 years.
Not only that, the time starts on the filing date, and let assume that there is no extension (e.g. delay issue created by the USPTO side) and they will pay the due (fees) for the whole time of the patent if it is granted.
Where do you get vacuum?
Outer space is an unlimited resource. Let's mine Outer space for vacuum! Vacuum is the new oil of the 21st century.
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An artificial arm with this technology would be fantastic, light weight, cheap and flexible like its organic counterpart. But there are draw backs
1)It is strong to its weight but its weight is low, it needs to be strong flat out and these systems look like a child could pull them open even under tension.
You underestimate the power of air pressure, assuming it has a reasonable amount of surface area to work on. At 14.2 pounds per square inch or about one kg per square cm it won't take much surface area to overpower even a strong man, let alone a child, and these things are folded to provide lots of area.
2)It is slow, which for some operations still leaves it within the realm of practical but for the majority of applications this is unacceptable.
3)Flex fatigue would be a factor, in a lab just to demonstrate with fresh materials it looks good, but in the real world where things get scratched and wear down I cannot honestly see one of these muscles lasting beyond a month in indoor conditions before fraying and failing (most appear to need the entire surface to be unbroken to maintain a seal). In outdoor conditions this would occur much faster and water based units would be highly temperature sensitive.
I dunno, modern plastics can be pretty damn tough. Even if they have to be replaced every 6 months or so (indoors), that could be acceptable if they're cheap enough to make. The nuisance of having to replace them could compensate for the high initial cost of a precision machined hydraulic solution