A Japanese company called Asahi Kasei has developed the world’s first elastic electrical cable – and has taken the liberty of christening it “Roboden” (here’s a link, if your Japanese is good). In a somewhat unsettling comparison, TechCrunch notes that Roboden can stretch by a factor of 1.5, “like the human skin.”
The comparison (which Asahi Kasei actually makes itself) is in fact apt, since one of the main applications Asahi Kasei envisions is in humanoid robotics. Typically, for robots to be able to articulate their rigid joints, roboticists have to include extra, slack wiring to accommodate the movement. A stretchy cable is more forgiving, eliminating the need for some of that slack. Asahi Kasei is also one of the world’s major manufacturers of spandex (though under the brands ROICA and Dorlastan), so the company is very much at home in the world of the stretchy. “We thought, if we can make a cable that stretches by a factor of 1.5, it could be used for wearable electronics, or for wiring the skin of humanoid robots,” Shunji Tatsumi of Asahi Kasei Fibers told Diginfo TV, in one of the latter’s trademarked deadpan video reports.
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