Walking With Coffee is a Little-Understood Feat of Physics
upstart writes:
The coffee, a thermally agitated fluid contained in a cup, has internal degrees of freedom that interact with the cup which, in turn, interacts with the human carrier.
"While humans possess a natural, or gifted, ability to interact with complex objects, our understanding of those interactions -- especially at a quantitative level, is next to zero," said ASU Professor Ying-Cheng Lai, an Arizona State University electrical engineering professor. "We have no conscious ability to analyze the influences of external factors, like noise or climate, on our interactions."
Yet, understanding these external factors is a fundamental issue in applied fields such as soft robotics.
"For example, in design of smart prosthetics, it is becoming increasingly important to build in natural modes of flexibility that mimic the natural motion of human limbs," said Brent Wallace, a former undergraduate student of Lai's and now a doctoral student in ASU's Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. "Such improvements make the prosthetic feel more comfortable and natural to the user."
According to Lai, it is conceivable that, in the not-too-distant future, robots will be deployed in various applications of complex object handing or control which require the kind of coordination and movement control that humans do quite well.
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