Day of the Robotic Tentacle

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist is reporting on a robotic tentacle developed thanks to funding from military agency DARPA. From the video it looks to have a lot of potential, I can almost feel it fastening around my ankle right now."

Clever

[slusich]

Clever, though it seems to operate more like an elephant trunk or a prehensile tail rather then a tentacle. I would think it would perform it's job more effectively by using a vacuum system with selectable ports to help hold onto objects.

It does raise the interesting question about using design found in nature for robotics.
Personally I'm not sure if that's the right way to go, or if we could find better ways to perform these tasks using alternative designs that don't have a natural influence.

Re:Tentacles indeed

[eviloverlordx]

DARPA: taking hentai in brave, new directions. Your tax dollars at work.

That's better than a lot of the ways the government could spend our money.

Re:Clever

[enderak]

Personally I'm not sure if that's the right way to go, or if we could find better ways to perform these tasks using alternative designs that don't have a natural influence.

For robots dedicated to a single task (such as assembly line robots) I would agree, but for a general purpose robot that can adapt to varying conditions and situations, it's hard to argue with hundreds of millions of years worth of evolution.

Re:Clever

[Mouse42]

Possibly, but they're not comparable as evolution designs for survival in particular enviornments, where humans would design for various tasts (window washing for example). You can claim that you're window washing robot is more intelligently designed than what evolution has churned out, but the claim lacks any credebility because there's no evolution-designed window washer to compare it to.

Re:simple math

[RedNovember]

Sorry but you screwed up here:

Tenticle Robot + Tenticle Pr0n = An unhappy nerd + pr0n As we all know, this is a logical fallacy, since a nerd with pr0n is never unhappy.

An unhappy nerd + pr0n = A happy nerd. Therefore Tentacle Robot + Tentacle Pr0n = A happy nerd. Makes sense to me.

Re:Quick!

[zippthorne]

Yes it was a war-bot. In fact, since it was designed to kill but didn't, one could say that it's just another case of hollywood depicting robots inevitably malfunctioning yet again.