- securing relatively safe chemicals and doing my own home-brew research on lubrication for gears and what not (e.g. how many rotations is the lube good for, how much does it reduce the coefficients of friction for the lever-arm or rotor by, can it be applied as a resin like most common lubricants or does it need to be a liquid sealed within a solid capsule like most human lubricants [e.g. synovial fluid of the knee joint], etc).
- creating practical-if-eccentric contraptions that accomplish mundane goals for me (think Rick Moranis in Honey, I shrunk The Kids or Dr. Emmett Brown in Back to the Future); for example, some things I want to construct include (1) an automatic grater (not to be confused with a blender)(and only just thought of it right now, but it'd sure be nice), (2) an electric shower-brush (a, make it water-safe and very low-current, and b, picture an electric toothbrush only jumbo sized), (3) a simple-but-effective remote-controlled door that I could install onto a fire alarm (a, picture how a garage door opens and now apply that visual to the battery latch for a fire alarm, and b, because I'm a good citizen but also a frequent cooker and I hate it when a pan on a clean stove, no soap or oil residue at all, and nothing inside but water comes to a boil and manages to set off my alarm), etc. You get the idea. These are all just ones I thought of off the top of my head right now. Because I've got tons, and unfortunately putting myself on the spot to try and recall the best ones only ended up in me mind-blanking.
- working (for real) on robotics' locomotion, i.e. I'd like to create small, unintelligent robotic contraptions (picture those semi-autonomous hover-vacuums shaped like a frisbee) and mostly tinker with their footgear, trying to optimize them for different terrains (carpet, wood, sand, grass, asphalt, snow, ice) and elevations (flat, steep-up, steep-down, macroscopically hilly (e.g. sand dunes), supra-microscopically hilly (e.g. a quilt or a pillow), and microscopically-but-appreciably hilly (e.g. sandpaper). For example, I think the best way to walk over sandpaper would be if you had lubricated feet -- so that the body oil / sweat / mucus (hypothesized organic parallels) would seep into the ravines and meet the bottom of your foot at the top of the crests. (See picture below.)
Typed all this after a 2nd shower today, have glasses off, sorry for typos, will fix later.
3 comments:
The best way to walk over sandpaper would be if you had a sandpaper-like foot. Then you would have excellent traction and no slippage.
Sweet. I'd love to have a patent to my name before I die. Unfortunately, I'm not very mechanical.
For the foot I drew, you're absolutely right, Blaise: my design would create slippage, as pedal organisms (like us) require traction to "push off" with and my design seeks to remove friction.
But if the robot is a skater (e.g. a water skater, an ice skater, etc) then the goal is indeed to minimize friction to a small-but-non-zero value so that the push-off can still take place but that after that "slippage" facilitates traveling a very far distance without having to push off once again, i.e. the less the friction, the less the ability to "push off" but also the less the need per period of time.
So with a slight modification to my proposed design, instead of reducing the hills and valleys of sandpaper to complete flatness, maybe it would behoove us to reduce them (say) to 90% or 95% smoothness, and in that manner allow for the skater-bot to still have the tallest 5% or so of peaks to push off of and then allow him to glide over the lubricant the remainder of the way -- or at least until his next push off is needed.
Indeed, a simpler proposed model could be one in which the robot squirts lubricant *ahead of* him rather than *directly under* him; and so in that manner:
a) he has 100% traction beneath him to push off on, but
b) he has 100% "slippage" to skate over once he gets going
In other words, maybe the ideal would be to have your "sandpaper-footed" robot but equipped with a little squirter in each leg or ankle that squirts out lubricant directly in front of the bot. Or some such.
Just thoughts. ^^;
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