You know how sometimes, you don’t know you need a thing until it’s right there in front of you? That’s the case with a pair of NASA gloves. Initially destined for ISS robots, they ended up in General Motors laboratory #objectmagic
For nine years, GM and NASA worked on a pair of “Hulk” gloves, an accessory that could grant superhuman strength to anyone who wore them. Reading this, you might feel pulled in fairy tale land but we assure you, the team of engineers pulled it off and made it real. The wearable gloves, designed originally for Robonaut 2 (a bot launched in space in 2011), have an enviable network of sensors, actuators and “tendons” that help the wearer grab objects with more force than humanly possible. In doing so, they don’t alter the expected dexterity of a human hand.
Hulk gloves should improve human efficiency while decreasing fatigue by reducing “the amount of force that a worker needs to exert when operating a tool for an extended time or with repetitive motions”, Kurt Wiese, vice president of General Motors Global Manufacturing Engineering, said in a press release. People in construction and medical field should benefit from them the most.
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