Sources Contact Advanced Search Tutorials

An Interest In:

Web News this Week

Search Archive

Some of Our Sources

View All Sources

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

November 28, 2017 04:00 am

Scientists Have Built Robot Muscles That Can Lift 1,000 Times Their Own Weight

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.)

Slashdot

Slashdot was originally created in September of 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it is owned by Geeknet, Inc..

More About this Source Visit Slashdot