Obviously
scaling this up into practical human sized devices will still be a challenge
but we now have the actual magic ingredient to make it all possible. Once again our imagination falls short before
the deliverable reality.
It will be a
long time evolving into the technology we need and want but it is now
inevitable in the same way our present was inevitable with the invention of the
transistor on a silicon chip sixty years ago.
We will get I robot devices that make the fictional look outright
clumsy. And oh yes it is time to update
our laws of robotics.
It will be a
challenge to engineer this out but the payoff is obvious and it will be
done. It is usually about now that
someone suggests that we stop now. I
always wondered what happened to those guys?
Scientists
create Terminator-style muscle at 1,000 times human strength
Published time: December 22, 2013 16:46
American scientists have developed a robotic muscle
1,000 times more powerful than a human’s – using a revolutionary material that
fluidly changes its properties.
The invention gives vanadium dioxide amazing,
superhero-style powers. Its most striking property is to change shape and
structure whenever differing amounts of heat are applied to it.
This made it perfectly suited for creating a
torsional motor muscle, as researchers at the US Department of Energy’s
(DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have found, the Lab’s website reported.
Added to this is the material’s capacity for
changing size and other physical characteristics. And when made into a robotic
muscle, its estimated strength equals to hurling objects 50 times its weight
and five times its length at speeds as fast as 60 milliseconds.
Team leader on the study, Junqiao Wu, said in
Berkeley Lab’s statement that they have “created a micro-bimorph dual coil
that functions as a powerful torsional muscle, driven thermally or
electro-thermally by the phase transition of vanadium dioxide.”
Wu, who is a member of both Berkeley Lab and the
Berkeley University’s Materials Science and Engineering department, co-authored
the research submitted to the journal Advanced Materials,
entitled “Powerful, Multifunctional Torsional Micro Muscles Activated by
Phase Transition.”
Vanadium dioxide is not a new material to the electronics
industry, already receiving praise for its ability to be both an insulator (at
low temperatures) and a conductor (whenever the temperature is raised to above
67 degrees) undergoing what scientists call a temperature-driven phase
transition. They say that more energy-efficient optical and electronic devices
are definitely in the cards.
And that is not all. For when heated, vanadium
dioxide’s crystals begin to rapidly contract along one dimension, while
expanding along the other two, showing that a structural phase transition
effected by temperature changes is also taking place. This physical property
means that in future, using the material for anything from artificial muscles
to robotic technologies and complex machinery is practically a given.
As Wu explains, “miniaturizing rotary motors is
important for integrated micro-systems and has been intensively pursued over
the past decades… the power density of our micro-muscle in combination with
its multi-functionality distinguishes it from all current macro- or
micro-torsional actuators/motors.”
This opens doors for scientific progress being made
almost exponentially, as a series of micro-muscles could be used to build a
more complex organism – perhaps even simulate an active neuromuscular system, due
to the material’s miraculous property of “proximity sensing and torsional
motion [which] allow the device to remotely detect a target and respond by
reconfiguring itself to a different shape,” Wu says. “This simulates
living bodies where neurons sense and deliver stimuli to the muscles and the
muscles provide motion.”
However researchers say it is a little too early to
start fearing a Terminator-style rise of the machines, as the mechanism in
question is currently the size of a microchip.
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