This revolution in tech may solve overheating issues permanently
Written by Aqil Nasri
Sweating has been such a standard process in our lives that we never really give it a thought. It’s part of our lives, part of how we live, and part of what makes us human, right?
Well, these scientists have gone the extra mile and came up with an invention that could forever change the way machines operate.
Introducing the gripper, a soft robot hand/finger that sweats.
The robot was designed for long operating hours, in which normal machinery might get easily overheated and lead to problems in future performances. The robot is built by having hollow, pressurized reservoirs inside the finger-like design of the robot. The reservoirs are then filled with water and connected to the surface via ducts that are made of heat-reactive plastic. So, once the plastic gets at a certain temperature, the pores surrounding the plastic would open and water from inside the reservoir get pushed out.
The water then evaporates, in which a cooling effect is produced towards the robot’s fingers. This mechanism is almost identical to the sweat glands that humans have, which basically tells us that humans are pretty well made.
Image Credit: CNN International
The gripper was created by scientists from Istituto Italiano di Technologia and Cornell University. They’ve claimed that this could be very important for designing robots that one day could fully operate independently.
Robert Shepherd, associate professor of Cornell’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and also co-author of the research, said this during a briefing, “We believe [this] is a basic building block of a general-purpose, adaptive, and enduring robot”.
If you want to know more about the robot, read the paper that was published in Science Robotics recently.
Well, do you think this invention will be used for future iterations? Let us know below!
