As soon as I saw this article on Gizmodo I knew I would have to blog about it. You are best to view the video to fully understand the mechanics and engineering behind it, however, to sum up briefly there are two main components to this:
1. The Jamming Concept: A flexible skin with air and loosely packed particles inside it. The air inside this is able to be compressed or decompressed to make the overall shape flexible or tough/rigid.
2. The Jamming Skin Concept: A [hyper] elastic skin made up of multiple ‘jamming’ sections in constructed to make a fully closed object. Inside this skin is an incompressible fluid and an actuator [motor] that controls volumetric variation [the amount of air inside the object].
Combining these two components as you can see on the video enables the object to change its volume at will. However, the innovativeness behind this concept is that multiple sections of the overall shape can be controlled in terms of flexibility and rigidness to achieve movement. Future applications of such technology will surely see actions such as gripping. To some this may just seem like an inflatable ball rolling on the ground, others can see the potential of robots being able to navigate in until now impossible scenarios for even humans.
That’s my daily tech for today. Am surprised that Skynet wasn’t present on that splash screen at the end. All I can say is watch out of the T-1000 coming to a store near you soon!
