Tentacle Technology

be talking about tentacle technology today. Yeah. So we hope that you like BioMedics podcasts real well, because those are basically our favorite things, I think, especially when Jonathan is not in office to monitor us. Yeah, if you haven't been around for previous podcast episodes when Jonathan wasn't here, we did I think bees and some other kind of bugs. Ants. Yeah, no, I think we did ants with Jonathan. Spiders, might have

done spiders without him. We did bugs ones for a long time, and and we kind of are running out of bugs to talk about, which is weird because there's there's trillions of them there are there are Well, we also did some some cockroach stuff a couple episodes ago. But anyway, Yeah, so, so we decided to move on to something else kind of creepy, and the tentacles and

or arms would be a really good route. Well, you know, when you picture the robots of the future, they've got to have tentacles, right, They've got to have them, because tentacles are really the best kind of appendage. They're awesome. Humans would be better if we had them. I think bears would be marginally improved with tentacles. They're pretty much the best. They wouldn't be improved for my personal use, I would prefer bears to not have tentacles, but I'm

sure bears would love to have them. I'm going to go ahead and speak for bears definitively. I'm a supporter of the Second Amendment, the right to bear tentacles. Oh goodness, my gracious, I walked into that one so hard. Hold on a second, what was that joke I just made? Well, I'm playing on a little vocab disclaimer we need to make, which is tentacles versus arms? Yes, which I kind of mentioned a second ago. But um, alright, So so octopi

or octopuses, whichever you prefer. I think it's octopuses. If you don't want to sound like a jerk. Okay, that's never stopped us before here on forward thinking. Um, So, so octopuses have arms. Yeah, octopuses have eight arms. These are eight non retractable arms, and that's all they got, just the arms. Squid and cuttlefish, on the other hand, they have those eight arms, those eight non retractable arms going out, but they've also got two longer appendages that

are technically tentacles tentacles. These are what a scientist would call a tentacle. It's what we can call tentacles as well. I mean really anyone can. But yes, the the official biological definition um is tentacles. And that's because they're a little bit different. Um. Tentacles tend to end in in what's term it's it's a club. Yeah, it's a sort of leaf shaped swelling out at the end of the tentacle.

And yeah, it's called a club. And the tentacles, i think typically are used more often specifically for catching prey, whereas the arms of a squid or an octopus they can grab things, they can catch prey, but they can also be used for swimming and walking around and clinging to surfaces and picking things up there. They're more all purpose,

right right. And also, arms are usually covered entirely in uh suckers or section cups on the undersides, yet on the underside is correct, whereas tentacles will only have those section cups on that club end. Yes, arms also may have a siri or or palps, which are these uh kind of kind of worm like things that come off of them in order to do stuff that sound beautiful nature, y'all. And arms have one more feature. They sometimes will have hooks, which are a kind of modified suction cup, which is

for hooking. I suppose, yeah, I think some species have well hooks, they're they're just hooks. That's cool. I I like I like hooks. I like captain hook. I like pirates. Both arms and tentacles are what you would call a muscular hydrostat which is a muscle that doesn't need to move a bone. It does its work all on its own. So it would be a muscle kind of like your tongue or like an elephant's trunk. And so there is a scientific distinction between arms and tentacles in a creature

like a squid. But we're going to kind of go with the common usage today where to the average person, those eight things on an octopus, they're all tentacles. Yeah, well we'll we'll refer to them as tentacles. Yeah yeah, we we respect the biological difference, but tentacles is a lot funnier to say. It is a funnier word. So let's get into some of these biomemetics, because, as we've seen on this podcast many times before, a lot of scientists and engineers love to look to nature to figure

out draw inspiration. Yeah right, how to build their robots or their tiny nano machines or create new materials. Is just there's a lot of research that's already gone into nature, that's been done by evolution. Let's just steal their work. Yeah yeah, just just plagiarize all of that and send it into space. What, yes, tentacle robots in space. Okay, so we're talking about tentacle limbs to go on robots

for grasping, Yes, tell me about it. Well, one of the classic robot problems that we talked about a lot on this show is is flexibility, um and and that's you know, most robot arms are are really rigid and kind of unforgiving. You don't want to put a baby next to it. Um, they're bad at at dealing with different kinds of materials and especially with unknown material reels. It's really tough to to teach a robot how to pick something up when it's never seen that thing before. Yeah,

and it might not know how delicate it is. And there are all these different variables that go into the sort of unconscious calculations your body does when you pick up a foreign object. Sure, sure it sounds really simple, but if you go to pick up a cup, your your fingers are giving you a lot of feedback about how squishable that cup is and how heavy it is, and what you need to do there for in order to get a good grip on it and not you know,

spill its contents all over yourself. Okay, so uh, tentacles better at doing this than rigid arms, really, yes, well, because you know they can conform to an object and kind of grip it as tightly as they need to without hope, hopefully without you know, hulking and just just spilling everything everywhere. Um. I assume that people I love the cup metaphor, but there the cup example. But I assume that robots pick up things other than cups pretty

frequently anyway. Um, some researchers and roboticists like Ian Walker of Clemson University are working on creating creepy, wonderful robotic tentacles. Um and yes, inspired by stuff like octopus arms and elephant trunks and giraffe tongues and climbing vines and all that good kind of stuff. Um, they they have been building these robotic arms that are capable of twisting around and grasping objects of varying shapes and materials, like, for example, the oct arm Lauren O C T A r M

oct arm. I like the sound of that. It's pretty great. Um. It's a pneumatic robot arm. And it came out of a DARPA funded project from two thousand three to two thousand and seven. And since Jonathan is not here, I'll go ahead and say it DARPA. That's the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Why I've never heard of that before.

We shall call it DARPA from now on. And according to Ian Walker via space dot Com, this thing, this, this arm can grab and stack cones of varying sizes, explore tunnel like environments, and manipulate objects it had never encountered before while submerged in water. Um, I'm not sure if I can do all of those things every day. So that's so, that's pretty rap. I can do almost nothing while submerged in water because I never figured out

how to open my eyes underwater. It's it's rough. It stings, man. Um, goggles are great, it's this new technology we might we could talk about later. Um. But but so robots like this aren't even expensive to build, but they are tricky to program, is the only probably, Yeah, I can see how that would be. Yeah. Um, but there are other octopus inspired robot arms. Yeah yeah, well not just octopus, but I guess all kinds of tentacle, cephalopod arm whatever

you call these grasping, swiggly things. One of them, that's a recent one I just read about today was the m I T Soft Rubber Robot Arms. So at m I T s c Sale, that's the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab under the direction of daniellow Rouse. And her name should be familiar to you if you've listened to this podcast for a while, because I keep seeing

her associated with weird awesome stuff that comes up here. Uh. So, that lab has turned out some really cool robots, and a recent one which I read about in an M I T press release from septemb is a soft rubber robotic arm that can move around by sort of writhing and slithering. Some descriptions compared it to a slithering snake, but the press release actually stipulated that was inspired by an octopus arm. It's made of silicone and that's sort of for the soft touch with three D printed molds.

And if you watch the video that they released of this thing, you can see how it controls its slithering motion, which is through tension and release of the soft silicone parts by inflating and contracting gas sacs and it looks really cool. If you had a robot with real arms like this, ideally it would be able to sort of reach down on into a crack or a hole or a pipe or you know, any kind of chasm, anything that you wouldn't want to put your arm down into

my eye socket. I don't know. Whatever it is, it can reach down with a sort of grasping manipulator that would be quote as soft as chewing gum, which is so sweet because, again, as you mentioned, most robots are hard. They're not. They're not soft and cuddly and nice. Yeah. No, again, it's the baby test, like if like, like, would you want to put this on your baby? Right, like, if your baby fell down a pipe, you'd want a soft arm that could go and wrap it up and pull

it back out, back out gently. That would be much preferable. Yes, um, I'm sure, and there are. Obviously, these are not the only grasping robot arms inspired by cephalopod arms and tentacles. Yes, and we will talk about a few more of them later on in the podcast. But first, let's talk more about motion. Yeah, let's let's go a little bit deeper into your dreams slash nightmares. Okay, so we've already got robots that are getting toward being able to grasp things

and manipulate them like an octopus or a squid. What about the way octopuses? Was that the plural we agreed on octopuses? Yeah? What about the way octopuses and squids move? So a topic we often come back to is robot locomotion, because getting from one place to another isn't always as easy as it would seem. Yeah, Yeah, that's that's one of those other classic problems. Yeah, especially for machines, so

wheels are pretty dependable. At this point. You can make a self driving car that if it stays on the road, works pretty well, but that won't work everywhere. What if your robot needs to climb a tree or a rocky hillside, or descend into a crevice or swim in the ocean. Okay, you're gonna have to deal with this now. A group of researchers in Europe have working on creating and studying a species of robot octopus that can swim. Robot octopus,

robot octopus that can swim. We're we're creating swimming robot octopuses. Now. Now, what I've seen is not a full octopus with like you know, an octopus soul and octopus eyes. It was more just kind of a tentacle. This would be arms technically, but we've said before they're sort of interchangeable, as we're

using a sort of arm tentacle motion simulator. In May, at the i Tripoli International Conference on Robotics and Automation and Karl's Rue Germany, a team of researchers who I think we're all from Greece gave a presentation entitled octopus inspired eight arm robotics swimming by sculling movements. That's another

verb I like. I'll explain that in just a minute. Uh. Before I get into that, I found a background explanation where Dr Dimitris sarkia Us, who is one of the researchers, explains why you might want something like a robotic octopus. So we want to have robots that can move around freely underwater, and this is important for a lot of

different applications. Imagine you need to do industrial maintenance on an underwater structure, or you need to do remote research in an underwater cave, or search and rescue on a shipwreck, like where the ship has become submerged, but there might be survivors trapped in air pockets inside. I don't know if you ever read any of those stories, but they're terrifying. I do not read them because they are terrifying. Yeah, or search and rescue, and say even something like a

flooded urban area. You know, maybe there's a flood and their basements and things like that. Anyway, it's important for these kind of robots to be highly mobile, but it's also important for them to be highly dextrous, so they can open doors, pick up objects, move things around, or you know, even gently hugged the torso of a live human. So you could try to accomplish that by pairing to

other different elements. So you have propellers for motion, and then you have some kind of protruding robotic claw arms or whatever kind of manipulator you want for the limbs. But what if we maximize deficiency by pairing propulsion and manipulation together into one machine feature. Yeah, because that's what octopus is already do. Right, So the soft flexible arms of an octopus connect as swimming limbs, walking limbs, and

grasping limbs. Can we do that with a robot? Well, the conference presentation showed the results of a study of octopus inspired swimming motion. As I said, uh so, the relevant type of octopus swimming is what you'd call sculling. It's also sort of what those fancy Ivy League rowboat kids do. It's it's a type of rowing. So it's where you use multiple ores at once and you're pushing

through the water to propel yourself forward with oars. Yeah, they all push in synchronization to drive the main body forward and the team study different octopus robots sculling motions with dynamical models. So these were computer simulations. They did simulations in software that try to simulate fluid dynamics to predict the performance of different systems dealing with real world conditions. They also built three D prototypes and got them swimming

around in a water tank. There is video of this on YouTube and it is beautiful. It's really weird. You should check it out. Yeah, so they tested different gates what they called gates. You know, I guess the gate for us would be like different ways of walking swimming gates. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so these would be swimming gates. The variations and gate could be controlled by how much the little robotic arms

moved and and in what order. So should they all push in synchronization sort of like you'd often see with an octopus trying to get away real fast? Yeah, yeah, the way that it kind of pulsates, if that makes sense, or should they row in alternating patterns? There are some of the as you'll see in the video where it almost looks random. I don't think it is random, but they, uh, the tentacles, the little robotic tentacles just move at different times, more kind of the way that say, a spider walks.

They also tested the difference between rigid arms and then these undulating, flexible arms that look more like a real octopus's limb. And one of the interesting things they discovered is that sculling doesn't necessarily produce the best fluid motion underwater, and some of the artificial gates made the robot move through the fluid environment much more smoothly, which makes you

wonder why octopuses don't already do this. Now there could be some compensating drawback or some anatomical limitation that prevents them from doing it. I don't know, but I thought that was interesting. Yeah, yeah, that nature had not selected for the more efficient But yeah, but maybe there's something we don't know about this. Actually, maybe octopus is just preferred. Maybe they thought real hard about it and they all agreed that they just weren't going to that. It's a

style thing, Yeah exactly. It's like, you know, is strutting really more efficient? No? But why wouldn't you strut? Okay, So we're working on robotic tentacles that can manipulate and grab, and we're working on robotic tentacles that can swim. So we're pretty much getting both of the parts together. Right, We're on the way to making a whole robot octopus. I don't know if anybody is actually planning on doing that, but the elements are coming together. Yeah, but that is

not all that is going on with tentacle inspired technology. No. In fact, you don't even have to look at the octopus scale. You could shrink it way down. Yes, we could be gripping things on a on a micro scale, which is uh just as terrifying actually. Um So, so let's let's talk about jellyfish tentacles. They're awful. I mean, they're wonderful from a biological standpoint, but they creep me right out. Um. From from a passive position drifting in

the water, jellyfish tentacles can can automatically ensnare prey. They're they're like living fly paper. Okay, and they're they're technically plankton, which is a thing that I always forget until I learn it again. Um, they're just really really big plankton. Wait, hold on, jellyfish are jellyfish are planks? They're like plankton that got huge. Yeah, they are literally plankton that got huge. That is what they are. They're nervous systems basically don't exist.

To quote you, that's awful. That's so awful. I typically love all animals. I kind of hate jellyfish. That's not fair, but I'm kidding. I don't actually hate jellyfish. They're they're wonderful, wonderful blobs of they're gorgeous. So their tentacles work like this, Uh, they're they're covered in thousands of specialized cells called nita blasts. That's spelled with the c N by the way um,

which just reminds me of like cinabiite. Switch is great from you know hell razor actually pronounced I don't know, why would you have silences? Sorry latin um. So so these these night o blasts have these little hair like trigger follicles, okay um. And when something brushes up against the tentacle and hits one of these triggers on one of these cells, the cell discharges a coil of this kind of fleshy thread that can either wrap around or or even penetrate a living thing, like like a dart um.

And those those living things are are usually their prey um, anything from from algae and smaller plankton um to two crustaceans and fish. In the case of larger jellyfish, UM, the threads also contain neurotoxins that paralyze that prey and sting the heck out of humans. So jellyfish. UM. Okay, now let's talk camp there, and this is coming back to tentacles, I promise, Just bear with me. One of the most dangerous things about cancerous cells is that they

don't always stay put right. They can metastasize or break off from their home site and move through your bloodstream to other parts of your body, where they can cause additional cancerous growth and damage bad times. UM. So, so when a patient is receiving treatment for cancer, doctors might test their blood for cancer cells to determine the best course of therapies, you know, to to see if the cancer is starting to move around, and figure out how

best to treat the patient. Um. It's still coming back to tentacles, I promise. UM. One way to find rogue cancer cells in a blood sample is to pour it through a device that's been coated on the inside with antibodies that are designed to um or that naturally stick to proteins found on the surface of cancer cells, but not on the surface of normal cells. So so the cancer cells will brush by these antibodies and stick to

them clever. It is very clever. UM, But the antibodies don't have a really high success rate because they're so super tiny, just just a couple nanometers long, and um, these cells rushing past might be some like ten to thirty micrometers, like thousands of times bigger. Right, So it's like trying to catch a really big beach ball with the tip of a super glue tube. Um, It's it'll stick, but it's hard to get it to latch. But hey, remember how I said just a couple of seconds ago

that jellyfish tentacles are super awesome passively capturing stuff. Inspired by this, a researcher by the name of Jeffrey Carp got a team together that designed tentacle like chains of d N A that stick to a protein found on cancer cells UM specific kinds of cancer cells. He was working with leukemia cells, lung cancer cells, and colon cancer

cells specifically. UM. But uh yeah, yeah that this team created a device with a kind of edged flow surface UM and lined it with these long, tentacle like DNA chains um and they report that it can catch up to eight of target cells that are pushed through the device. UM and since different chains of DNA can catch different kinds of protein, the devices are hypothetically customizable for detecting different kinds of cancer cells. Oh it's it's so, it's so cool, it's and you know it is only for

for blood testing purposes. Um. There were some reporters who I think kind of mistakenly got the idea that this could like go into your blood vessels and catch cancer cells as they were flowing through your body, and that that is not what this is for. If that ever happens, that would be pretty red But um, well, but I mean, detecting cancer is highly important to extremely important, especially early detection before these metastasized cells can start causing damage and

other organs. So yeah, but let's talk about something even kind of squiak ear, which is uh, tentacle suckers. Okay, now that we've cured your cancer, we're going to look at cephalopod limbs again. Okay, So cephalopods, squid, octopuses, cuttlefish. If you've ever looked at a squid or octopus limb, you've probably seen them covered on the inside with big clusters of protruding concave rings. These are often called suction

cups or suckers, and they held with gripping. So when a squid or an octopus wants to grab a delicious meal let's say it's a krill or you know, small fish, crustacean or chihuahua uh aqueous, and they want to shove it into the gaping beak of yummy nous, they latch onto the prey organism with the suction cups on their arms. Now, these suction cups are not the same on all right, right, Um, octopuses have very muscular section cups, which is how they function. Um.

They have such complex muscular and nervous systems. Um, they've got separate controls for each arm. And and those arm controls can work independently of the brain. No, I think you messed up, you said, independently of the brain. Of the brain. Yes, a research if if a researcher cuts off an octopus's arm, which isn't very nice, but that's you know for science. Um uh and and tickles the arm, it will react the same way that an attached arm

would react. Okay, weird creepy stuff. UM yeah, so so they have such complex muscular nervous systems that they can individually activate each section cup on their arms. Um. And there are a lot of these things, and each one

is really kind of like a tiny mouth. UM. The lips of the suckers can grip small stuff and irregular surfaces and um and and the whole the sucker as a whole can suction to larger, flatter objects, which is pretty creepy, pretty awesome, and lets them hold and manipulate all kinds of things, like like they can open jars and carry shells around um or even steal a diver's

camera if they want to. UM. So so. Inspired by this, a team led by robotic manipulation researcher Chad Kesson's of the University of Maryland, in collaboration with the U. S. Army, created robotic self sealing suction cups. Interesting. What the Army wants to do with robotic self sealing suction cups, I do not know, but they claim it's research and rescue. I'm sure it's for that. That is what they say

about everything that that. I love because it's cool, But then I also wonder deep down like, wait a minute, what's for military? Um, But tell me about it. I'm

I'll just I'll take them at their word. Yes, yes, um. So, so they place a bunch of these section cups on a robotic arm or tentacle kind of thing that has a vacuum pump inside, and each sucker sits closed by a little plug until the lip of the sucker comes into contact with an object, which causes the plug to release and the cup to attempt to um form a

seal on the object. Okay um, And the vacuum pump is going all the time, keeping all the plugs in place in the cups that are closed, and providing suction power to all the cups that are open. UM. And this is really clever because it allows the maximum amount of suction power UH to get to those open cups and UM. Traditional section robots will waste some of that energy and and create possible leak points by leaving all the suckers open all the time. So this is a

great workaround for that. That's pretty awesome. Yes, that is not the only biommetal suction cup technology that's based on cephalopod arms. For the other one, I think we should turn to squid. Okay, so on squid, you don't just have little suction cups. They're actually lined with rings of tiny, super sharp teeth. I even found a couple of pictures online of someone whose hands were marked up with lots of tiny little scratches, allegedly from working with squid, and

it looked like they've been playing with a kitten. Yeah, oh so cute. It was cute. It was like, let me hug you with my razor fingers. Don't worry. This does not mean they will cut giant scoops out of you like with a melon baller. The person behind these images was a cephalopod scientists named Donna Staff who in another blog post she describes the function of the sucker

teeth as similar to that of vel crow. So it's not really for like slicing out huge chunks, but for gripping right right, kind of like like when we've talked about the follicles on getck feet and how they help you, well, not you, but gets gripped walls and stuff. Sure, except with more teeth, more teeth. Anyway, these little suckers can

they inspire technology to you? Bet? There was a June nine publication in the journal a CS Nano called nano confined b sheets or that's beta sheets actually mechanically reinforce the supra biomolecular network of robust squid sucker ring teeth.

What on Earth does that mean? There's a good short ride up on the American Chemical Society press page, and they basically explained that through previous research, the authors had found out that the sucker ring teeth, those little tiny teeth we were just describing, which they abbreviate s RT, we're not like the teeth or bone of many other animals, which have to incorporate minerals or external elements, and instead, the sucker ring teeth are made completely out of proteins alone.

And in this paper they identified a bunch of the s r T proteins. There were thirty seven in addition to one they had already discovered from one species of

cuttlefish and two species of squid. And they also studied the structure of those proteins and found they presented as these beta sheets, which is a type of protein structure, and the researchers suggested that this stuff could be synthesized to create materials that are both strong and malleable, which could be really useful in say, biomedical scenarios, as like scaffolding to grow tissues on, for example, or just simply as an alternative to petroleum based packaging. It's just strong,

malleable stuff. We could use it for all kinds of things. Circular razor teeth to the future. Yes, they are saving our planet excellent. So there are plenty more wonderful technically technology things out there for you to go read about. Yes, and maybe we will do another episode about this kind of stuff in the future and that incredible future filled with tiny sucker teeth. Yes, well do you want to do?

You want to give in the closing moments of our podcast your little rant about why people shouldn't be mean to octopuses. Oh, they're smarter than your dog, like like your dog, not not just your dog, Joe, but most dogs. They're they're just gentle, beautiful creatures. They there. They don't really like hanging out like they just sort of want to hide and then eat stuff. And that's what I like doing. So I really think that you should not eat octopuses and you should be really nice to them

all the time. Thank you. Um, if you have anything to say to us. You can get in touch with us. You can email us at f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus, where our handle is submiteration of FW thinking. I'm have complete faith in your alities to find us, and you can also, of course find this podcast and more stuff on our website, which is FW thinking dot com and we hope to hear from you. Either way,

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