They Are Coming For Us!

One of the few things that has helped me cope with my robot uprising nightmares over the years has been the sheer logistics of a robot army. Surely there would be some kind of technological barrier that would stop them, right? Take batteries for example. Robots can’t just manufacture energy from their metal hands, right? (If they can, please don’t tell me. Ignorance is bliss.) Eventually, they just wouldn’t be able to sustain their bulky metal bodies.

Of course, that was before I read this post from the Cnet.com Crave Blog. Apparently, some students from the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory of the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech have developed a robotic hand that uses compressed air to grip objects. Go ahead and read that again. That’s right, baby. Air. As in the stuff you breath. How are we going to stop them now?!?

From the post:

Meet Raphael, the Robotic Air-Powered Hand with Elastic Ligaments. It’s a gripper that’s powerful enough to hold something heavy, say an Uzi, but delicate enough to grasp human brains without destroying them. Certainly this is what the robotic soldiers of the future will be outfitted with.

The hand uses compressed air that passes through tiny actuators to control each finger separately. A microcomputer dictates how much air is given to each finger through an accordion-like tube. Less air means a softer grip, while more air means a firm grip that could rip out a human’s windpipe.

The students who designed the man-killing machinery will be splitting a $10,500 prize for winning first place in an innovative-design competition sponsored by the Cleveland-based Compressed Air and Gas Institute, the association of manufacturers of compressed air and gas systems and equipment. Besides standalone robots, the hand could be fitted to amputees as a prosthetic, creating murderous cyborgs or, hopefully, humans capable of fighting off the mechanical menace with their own parts.