Scientists from Virginia Tech have developed an octopus-inspired glove. The new device is capable of securely gripping objects underwater, and this should aid a number of activities in relation to marine engineering.
For any underwater activity, the human hand also is poorly equipped to hold onto things. To achieve anything comparable to gripping things on land, humans have to exert greater force and this can make more finely balanced operations challenging.
Inspiration for the new device came from octopuses. These creatures can take hold of myriad things in an aquatic environment
According to lead researcher Assistant Professor Michael Bartlett: “Nature already has some great solutions, so our team looked to the natural world for ideas. The octopus became an obvious choice for inspiration.”
Each sucker that an octopus possesses (2,000 suckers across eight arms) resembles the shape and function of the end of a plunger. This contributes a powerful snatching ability. The outer rim of the sucker creates a seal with an object. Following this, the muscles contract and relax the cupped area behind the rim adds to and releases the pressure. At times when many of the suckers are used the overall effect is that of a strong adhesive bond.
To design their glove, the scientists developed compliant, rubber stalks capped with soft, actuated membranes. These were developed to perform the same function as the sucker of an octopus by activating a reliable attachment to objects with light pressure. In practice, the glove adheres to both flat and curved surfaces.
The glove is capable of different gripping modes, from delicate and lightweight objects to heavier items. Tials showed how the glove can be used to pick up and manipulate flat, cylindrical, convex, and spherical objects.
The glove can also sense objects and trigger the adhesion. For this, the control is achieved through an array of micro-LIDAR optical proximity sensors. These can detect how close an object is. The suckers and LIDAR are connected through a microcontroller. These are tightly integrated to fuse wearable systems grabbing many different shapes underwater.
The new marine glove is called the Octa-glove: soft, responsive adhesive materials combined with embedded electronics.
The research appears in the journal Science Advances. The research paper is titled “Octopus-inspired adhesive skins for intelligent and rapidly switchable underwater adhesion.”
