Clothbot is a creepy climbing robot that wants to explore your clothes

You can probably relate to the creepy feeling of a spider crawling up your pants. You just go nuts, right? But how about a robot climbing up your pants? Does that sound better? This week at the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Minnesota, a team of scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese University of Hong Kong introduced a climbing robot named Clothbot. Clothbot is a tiny robot that has the ability to create a wrinkle in a piece of cloth using a pair of opposing gripper wheels.

Basically it has an omnidirectional tail that adjusts the robot’s center of gravity and helps it to change its direction while it navigates its way onto a person’s body. Clothbot weights around 140 grams, so you don’t have to worry about it climbing around your back. The scientists said that Clothbot can be used as a tiny robot pet that can climb on human bodies, or even a movable phone that can enable people to talk hands-free. The designers also jokingly said that Clothbot could be a good robot for body inspection. Now that’s creepy.

Gene Ryan Briones
Categories: Robots