iRobot's oozy ChemBot amazes and terrifies
For now, it's palm-size, sure, but what if something terrible happens, and it can't stop inflating?
(Credit: YouTube screenshot by Leslie Katz/CNET)We're getting a first glimpse of that shape-shifting ChemBot we first told you about last year, and well, it looks like the love child of a beating heart and a wad of Silly Putty.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army Research Office awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to iRobot to create the flexible military bot. The maker of the Roomba and Scooba, along with University of Chicago researchers, showed off the oozy results at the Iros conference (the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) in St. Louis this week.
DARPA envisions the palm-size ChemBot as a mobile robot that can traverse soft terrain and navigate through small openings, such as tiny wall cracks, during reconnaissance and search-and-rescue missions. It gets around by way of a process called "jamming," in which material can transition between semiliquid and solid states with only a slight change in volume.
In ChemBot's case, a flexible silicone skin encapsulates a series of pockets containing a mix of air and loosely packed particles. When air is removed from the compartments, the skin attempts to equalize the pressure differential by constricting the particles, which shift slightly to fill the void left by the evacuated air.
In that way, the weird little blob inflates and deflates parts of its body, changing size and shape--and scaring the living daylights out of us. We don't know exactly when ChemBot will join the Armed Forces, but we can only beg: please, oh please, keep it away from us.
(Via IEEE Spectrum)
Leslie Katz, senior editor of CNET's Crave, covers gadgets, games, and most other digital distractions. As a co-host of the CNET News Daily Podcast, she sometimes tries to channel Terry Gross. E-mail Leslie. 
Still great progress though. We'll see where it leads.
I respectfully disagree. My reasons being:
1) For moving so slow, then rolling so fast, it would have to bulge the opposite way to stop rolling.. the acceleration would be extremely impressive.
2) The work is not discredited by being sped up. It serves to actually interest people, because no one would watch this video if it were 10 minutes.
3) I do a LOT of video work. I have logged thousands of hours analyzing video.
If I'm wrong, I'll eat a Durian fruit!
Sorry SpeedPsycho, no Durian for you but what do you have against the King of Fruits?
Smells like Hell, Tastes like Heaven... :)
but still, awesome :)
makes you wonder though, what happens if you step on it
Hey, wait, get that thing off me, aaaaaa!
Bender: These balls are making me testy! If they don't stop bouncing and jiggling, I swear I'm gonna shove this treaty up their... Wait a minute, where do you shove things up a ball?
- by angusdeus October 21, 2009 3:49 AM PDT
- I want one!!!!!! no three then can cause even more chaos than normal, lol
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (26 Comments)and does anybody know" does it come in any other colours than pink?"