Scientists Have Built Robot Muscles That Can Lift 1,000 Times Their Own Weight (qz.com) 119
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.)
MECHWARRIORS! OUR TIME IS NOW! (Score:2)
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Patents expire after 20 years.
Nobody promised you a fusion reactor. That was the moron talking head on the TV not understanding the story.
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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.
Unacceptable. (Score:1, Funny)
I don't want my army of killer robots going limp the moment you decide to escape into space.
1,000 times their own weight! (Score:2)
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These'll go great with the adamantium skeleton I'm look at on ebay. Unfortunately, installation service isn't included.
Re:1,000 times their own weight! (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the catch is they aren't muscles. They're just structures held in place by air pressure. This is what happens when you're too specialized (or just running after DARPA money). It's only pneumatics/hydraulics. Anyone who has ever vacuum packed their food or clothing has created one of their 'robot muscles'. Granted their's have more complicated shapes, but that doesn't make them novel.
Many absolutely ingenious pneumatically-driven actuators were designed and used over the decades quite widely in many, many areas of industry, manufacturing, and defense for myriads of applications and uses all the way up through the 1950s-60s. Pneumatic technology of all sorts was one of the "cool" and "in" things in the early 1900s, many novel examples winding up being featured in "futuristic" displays in World Fairs during the period.
I say this to point out that these boys (bless their hearts) might be trying to reinvent the wheel, here.
Sometimes, reading these types of articles that are all breathless over something like pneumatics, or hydraulics in the case of a fluid-based system, I wonder if maybe modern-day scientific researchers and scientists miss prior work in some field they're in simply because they only research prior work that's been digitized and made available online while missing the huge amount of research and documentation that still exists only on paper and/or possibly microfiche that require relatively large amounts of man-hours to search and read.
Strat
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The catch is they only weigh 2 nanograms. Silly "scientists".
Indeed. "Lifting capacity as a multiple of weight" is a meaningless metric. It is trivial to achieve just by using a tiny displacement.
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"This 10 cm-long linear actuator was fabricated within 10 min, with materials costing less than $1. This actuator weighs 2.6 g, and it can lift a 3 kg object within 0.2 s using a 80 kPa vacuum. " (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/11/21/1713450114.full - the underlying research paper.)
Newsflash! (Score:2)
'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!
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Do you know the difference between "rediscover" and "apply in a new way"? A lot of discoveries and inventions are based on very old and established ideas with incremental tweaks and improvements, especially as other fields, like materials and manufacturing, advance in parallel.
Only a dollar! (Score:1)
My SUV runs on lug nuts and body panel rivets that only cost pennies each to manufacture!
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How ironic that the most expensive component on any vehicle is the logo glued on the grill.
If you can buy it separately from the grill, it usually costs under thirty bucks to replace the logo. I can probably name at least a half-dozen components that cost more than that to produce, starting with every major casting or forging, and I can sit here all day and name parts that cost more in the parts department.
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People are silly.
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I'm sure they were trying to say something clever about how people pay more for a car because it has a fancy badge on it, but I enjoy being pedantic which is why I Slashdot.
unsubstantiated claims (Score:1)
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 ge
The cost of vacuum (Score:2)
(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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Microsoft.
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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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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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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
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Spellcheck said it was OK.
Uh, watch out for that... (Score:2)
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 wea
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It's great to be aware of certain dangers.
But damn....
The disadvantage of vacuum pressure (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [sciencelearn.org.nz]. 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 [youtube.com].
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You just pointed out what is awful about science reporting. The summary is written to make you think the muscles are strong, when you seem to be pointing out that the muscles are weak.
can lift up to 1,000 times their own weight.
That *sounds* strong! But without something to compare it to that number is meaningless. It also sounds like it's the wrong unit of measure anyway.
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Fair enough. Strength to weight ratio is indeed a valid measure.
Unrelated apology: I didn't preview, which is why I have the nested quote. Whoops!
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The problem I see is the muscle doesn't do shit without a vacuum system and they are not including that weight in their calculations.
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It said in the summary it's origami based. So, in fact, we can have Mechwarriors powered by these muscles.
They will be made out of paper.
Illiterate (Score:3)
Taut.
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However, it's actually misspelled in TFA, so as a direct quote it is actually correct. A little [sic] note from the editor wouldn't have hurt, though.
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and pretty useless though
Why useless? Consider the previously cited example of a forklift. [Leaving the issue of the inevitable Chinese forklift [facelift.co.uk] for future discussion]
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Just to make sure that we are on the same page: if you create whatever machine able to lift certain weight and put a person freely moving inside without any contact with the structure, it might be OK (extremely uncomfortable and pretty useless though). What I meant was the person's body also participating like what happens with a robotic arm or Spiderman's Doctor Octopus.
I think you're making a point that's obvious to anybody who gives a moment's thought to these things. Of course, putting a metal arm on someone doesn't allow that person to lift 1000lbs - their legs, spine, and rest of their body needs to support the same weight. Surprise, surprise, action movies aren't realistic.
A full exoskeleton, though, which itself provides the leg and spine structure, has no real upper limit on carrying capacity. The human is just the driver at that point and so the machine can do wha
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As clarified above, if the person's body isn't participating directly, yes, although it would be pretty pointless/uncomfortable.
Why pointless or uncomfortable? The exoskeletons that are being envisioned are just machines that have some of the benefits of tools and some of the benefits of vehicles - think of it as an excavator with a different toolset and interface. Or thought of another way - a very strong and versatile robot chassis that uses a human for sensing, control, and inverse kinematics calculations. Both of these things are potentially very useful.
Creating a robot walking like a person and lifting anything as a person does would be quite difficult too because of the associated instability. Most of actions performed in a movie like Ironman would be extremely difficult or directly impossible, regardless of the fact of having a person inside or not.
Hard controls problem != physical impossibility. The robotic exoskeleton is
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But what is the point of having a person inside it if he cannot directly perform the moves? Wouldn't be much better to have a remotely-controlled machine?
What's the point of having a person inside an excavator? While machines are powerful, AI is primitive and control is hard. A human is good at making decisions, but is relatively puny, so giving a human an intuitive interface and powerful hardware allows the human to be more productive. The human's natural ability to balance, not get its limbs tangled up, and do all sorts of things that are hard for robots would come in very handy. It really is just the equivalent of construction machinery but with more flex
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You think that movie-like exoskeletons make perfect sense for practical purposes, are physically doable and only a bit far away technologically speaking.
An exoskeleton like the one in Elysium, for instance, is a fairly direct descendant of military hardware that is being tested today, and the usefulness of any technology that allows a soldier to carry more armament for farther distances while retaining complete mobility seems pretty obvious. Do you think there are fundamental technological or physical hurdles that will make this unworkable? Lots of researchers and companies currently doing development in the field would disagree with you. That doesn't mean
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Here's something specific: http://bleex.me.berkeley.edu/r... [berkeley.edu]
This is still pretty early in the development of this type of tech, but this machine is already providing a higher level of strength (carrying a 200lb pack is no easy task) and simultaneously reducing the effort required by a human, with concrete, measurable numbers in terms of strength increase and efficiency improvement for the human. It seems straightforward to me that arms, weapons, armor, or other useful tech that is usually too heavy for a si
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Sorry, this link would have been better, and more specific: http://bleex.me.berkeley.edu/r... [berkeley.edu]
This specific system shows the 200lb value, and as you can see, this isn't a particularly large/complex machine. The legs could be much thicker, the motors could be much larger (and more powerful), and overall, this is one of the very earliest iterations of an almost brand-new technology type, so I expect that they've barely scratched the surface of what's possible.
Importantly, the question is what the main limitati
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Pnumatics != Muscles (Score:2)
Sheesh (Score:1)
Can Lift X1000 their weight..including the vaccum? (Score:2)
Just asking,
Does that x1000 include the weight of the vaccum?
Japan needs these right about now (Score:2)
This tech would be useful in a high-radiation environment.
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Water and air are cheap (Score:2)
But there are better fluids, and these will see use in larger, serious applications.
Then the fun begins.
From-the-Arch-dot-dep't. (Score:2)
Do you want Skynet ants? Because that's how you get Skynet ants.