Science News reports on gloves that are especially good at picking slippery things up and sticking to ’em thanks to “rapidly switchable” materials inspired by octopus tentacles:
“Being able to grasp things underwater could be good for search and rescue, it could be good for archaeology, [and] could be good for marine biology,” says mechanical engineer Michael Bartlett of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
Each sucker on the glove is a raspberry-sized rubber cone capped with a thin, stretchy rubber sheet. Vacuuming the air out of a sucker pulls its cap into a concave shape that sticks to surfaces like a suction cup. Pumping air back into the sucker inflates its cap, causing it to pop off surfaces. Each finger is also equipped with a Tic Tac–sized sensor that detects nearby surfaces. When the sensor comes within some preset distance of any object, it switches the sucker on that finger to sticky mode.
Bartlett and colleagues used the glove to pick up objects underwater, including a toy car, plastic spoon and metal bowl. Each sucker could lift about one kilogram in open air — and could lift more underwater, with the help of buoyancy, Bartlett says. Adding more suckers could give the glove an even stronger grip.
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There are videos at the link, and you can read more about Bartlett and colleagues’ work here, in Science Advances.