Click here for stunning video of Airic’s_arm.

As a young boy who obsessively read the ads in the back of Popular Science and relentlessly sent in those cardboard “for more information” cards, my mailbox (the physical one!) was always filled with product marketing from countless engineering and technology companies. One of the more interesting products to me at the time was NITINOL, the nickel-titanium shape memory alloy developed by the Naval Ordnance Laboratory.

Having read the NITINOL literature and having a huge preoccupation with robotics and artificial intelligence, my young mind often thought that the best way to make a human-like android with human-like movement would be to – obviously – model it on a human! I had childhood dreams of bundling NITINOL wires together into muscle groups, fastening them together onto a bone structure and making a truly human android.

As unsophisticated and impractical as those boyhood dreams were, I’ve nevertheless been amazed over the years by the fact that there have been so few technologies that attempt what I thought as a child was a pretty obvious idea. Perhaps I’ve simply missed all of the robot movement studies over the years, but in the popular mind and media, save for Asimo, there have been precious few robots that genuinely appear human in their movement.

That’s why I was excited to “Airic’s_arm”, a project by the industrial automation firm Festo.

From their website:

The Airic’s_arm is a robotic arm fitted with artificial bones and muscles. The bone structure, consisting of the human bones such as ulna and radius, metacarpal bone and finger bone, shoulder joint and shoulder blade – joints that do not occur as such in the technical world – is moved via 30 muscles.

I can’t wait to see these ideas implemented in torso and leg modeling, and to see the resultant bipedal action.

Link via Boing Boing via Core77 Design Blog (pretty cool stuff there!).

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