Robots that mimic the human body really only exist to either slot into a human-shaped space or make we mere fleshbags feel better. If you don’t have to follow that template, then you can make something far more efficient and terrifying. So all-hail our robot octopus overlords!
Robotic Grippers Are a Tough Engineering Problem
Getting a robot to pick something up, manipulate it, and then put it back where you want is much harder than it sounds. Setting aside the perceptual and cognitive issues you have to solve, the “end effector” still needs to offer high levels of dexterity, and enough strength to do its job, while being sensitive and precise enough not to damage the object it’s working with.
Human Hands Are Hard to Mimic
Human hands are an incredible feat of natural selection. We might think it’s our big brains that have put us at the top of the food chain, but our dextrous hands were just as instrumental in making homo sapiens sapiens what it is today. Replicating an artificial hand has proven to be one of the hardest problems in robotics.
I still remember what a big deal it was when the Shadow Hand was revealed. An artificial hand with comparable dexterity and performance to a human hand. Of course, the hand has a massive “forearm” but hey, baby steps.
Current state-of-the-art robot platforms like Optimus Gen 2 from Tesla, or the all-electric Boston Dynamics Atlas have compact and highly-functional humanlike hands.
However, those hands are likely a key reason these bots are complex and expensive to develop.
Octopus Tentacles Are Just One Way Cephalopods Are Better Than Humans
Because we use our fleshy fingerpods to do everything, it’s natural that we think robots should have them, but nature has produced many different ways for living creatures to grab and manipulate things.
A research team from the University of Science and Technology of China has published a paper titled SpiRobs: Logarithmic spiral-shaped robots for versatile grasping across scales.
In it, the authors show how many animals have versatile grippers based on the principle of a logarithmic spiral, such as sea horses, chameleons, octopuses, and elephants.
So they created “SpiRobs” or Spiral Robots that use one or more of these tentacle-like appendages to securely grip just about anything. Best of all, these individual spiral arms simply work by having an elastic cable curl or uncurl it. Which does away with most of the complexity found in human hand analogs.
If you read the paper, you’ll see that this was much easier said than done. There were numerous prototypes to get the actual spiral and its segments just right, and likewise the cable control had to be fine-tuned as well.
However, based on the numerous video clips embedded in the paper, this method works really well and the octobot tentacle seems both agile and strong, while not crushing things that aren’t meant to be crushed.
Robotic Octopus Tentacles on Flying Drones? Sure, why not?
The applications for this technology is clearly pretty wide, but what I didn’t expect was to see a drone with a SpiRob arm doing an alien abduction on a bucket!
Can you imagine a large rescue drone swooping in and sweeping you off to safety? Yes, it sounds terrifying, but then again, most terrifying things are also awesome in some way.
Personally, I look forward to a huge amount of diversity in the various robots that will enter our society this century. All the necessary techologies are maturing rapidly, so perhaps by 2050 the typical city or town will be swarming with all sorts of interesting mechanical creatures, doing everything from delivering your food to cleaning the windows on skyscrapers.
