Scientists study how to transport hot coffee without spilling it

Carrying a cup of coffee while walking doesn’t seem so difficult. People do it every day. But it’s actually more complicated than it looks – the coffee is splashing around and it’s hot enough to hurt you if it splashes. So engineers want to know more about how we do it.

Researchers at Arizona State University published an article in the scientific journal Physical Review Applied that looks at coffee transport strategies – and it could help them develop intelligent robots.

“A complex object is a system with internal degrees of freedom, like a hot cup of coffee held by a walking human,” the researchers write. “Despite the natural ability of humans to manipulate complex objects, it is not understood how this is accomplished, but the problem is fundamental for applied fields such as soft robotics.”

By using a movable bowl with a mechanical ball inside instead of a cup of coffee, researchers have learned that humans use two distinct strategies to manipulate what they call a complex object, like the full cup of coffee. . But the research is less about these strategies than about the transition between the two, how humans instinctively know how to change their method and not get splashed with decaffeinated coffee.

Robots don’t have that instinct, duh, but studying how we humans do it can help engineers design smart robots that might eventually need to deal with complex objects and change strategies on the move.

“The results of this study can be used to implement these human skills in soft robots with applications in other fields, such as rehabilitation and the brain-machine interface,” said the co-author of the ‘study, Ying-Cheng Lai, in a statement.

Making robots smarter may still seem like something the Terminator movies tried to warn us about, but innovative robots could actually help us stay healthy.