A brand new high-tech glove completely sucks — and that’s a superb factor.
Each fingertip is outfitted with a sucker impressed by these on octopus arms. These suckers enable folks to seize slippery, underwater objects with out squeezing too tightly, researchers report July 13 in Science Advances.
“Being able to grasp things underwater could be good for search and rescue, it could be good for archaeology, [and] could be good for marine biology,” says mechanical engineer Michael Bartlett of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
Sign Up For the Latest from Science News
Headlines and summaries of the most recent Science News articles, delivered to your inbox
Thank you for signing up!
There was an issue signing you up.
Each sucker on the glove is a raspberry-sized rubber cone capped with a skinny, stretchy rubber sheet. Vacuuming the air out of a sucker pulls its cap right into a concave form that sticks to surfaces like a suction cup. Pumping air again into the sucker inflates its cap, inflicting it to pop off surfaces. Each finger can be geared up with a Tic Tac–sized sensor that detects close by surfaces. When the sensor comes inside some preset distance of any object, it switches the sucker on that finger to sticky mode.
Bartlett and colleagues used the glove to select up objects underwater, together with a toy automotive, plastic spoon and metallic bowl. Each sucker might carry about one kilogram in open air — and will carry extra underwater, with the assistance of buoyancy, Bartlett says. Adding extra suckers might give the glove a fair stronger grip.
The octopus-inspired suckers on a brand new wetsuit glove can decide up objects of varied shapes and supplies, from a metallic toy automotive to a fragile, squishy hydrogel bead. Sensors on the glove activate suction at its fingertips at any time when it approaches an object, permitting wearers to select objects up with out even closing their fingers.
The octopus-inspired glove barely brushes the floor of what octopuses and different cephalopods can do. Octopuses can individually management hundreds of suckers throughout their eight arms to really feel across the seafloor and snatch prey. The suckers do that utilizing not solely tactile sensors, but additionally chemical-detecting cells that “taste” their environment (SN: 10/29/20).
The new glove is way from turning fingers into further tongues. But Bartlett is intrigued by the opportunity of including chemical sensors in order that the suckers persist with solely sure supplies.