Engineering
Inspired by the Japanese art of paper cutting, MIT engineers have designed a friction-boosting material that could be used to coat the bottom of your shoes, giving them a stronger grip on ice and other slippery surfaces.
Jun 1, 2020
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171
Robotics
Robots are becoming an increasingly important part of human care, according to researchers based in Japan. To help improve the safety and efficacy of robotic care, the scientists have developed a control method that could ...
Jan 15, 2020
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8
Robotics
Just a few years ago, "haptics" (interaction by touching) was a subject studied in only a few labs around the world. As it became more widely used in touch screens and in the automotive industry, the number of researchers ...
Jul 29, 2019
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149
Robotics
Industrial robots are now widely used and are indispensable in car manufacturing and in other fields. Conventional robot hands are suitable for grasping hard objects of fixed form, whereas it is not easy to grasp complicated ...
Jul 16, 2019
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10
Robotics
Researchers at Kanazawa University have recently developed a friction reduction system based on a lubricating effect, which could have interesting soft robotics applications. Their system, presented in a paper published in ...
Friction is the force resisting the relative lateral (tangential) motion of solid surfaces, fluid layers, or material elements in contact. It is usually subdivided into several varieties:
Friction is not a fundamental force, as it is derived from electromagnetic force between charged particles, including electrons, protons, atoms, and molecules, and so cannot be calculated from first principles, but instead must be found empirically. When contacting surfaces move relative to each other, the friction between the two surfaces converts kinetic energy into thermal energy, or heat. Contrary to earlier explanations, kinetic friction is now understood not to be caused by surface roughness but by chemical bonding between the surfaces. Surface roughness and contact area, however, do affect kinetic friction for micro- and nano-scale objects where surface area forces dominate inertial forces.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
