Clothbot Will Climb Your Shirt & Pants; Creepy As It May Seem!

How about a robotic pet squirrel climbing on to your shoulders? Or can you imagine entering the security check at an airport and a robot climbing your shirt and pants looking for any objectionable stuff that you may be found carrying? Well, the clothes climbing robot can just do that to you. Clothbot, a robot designed by the roboticists from the Chinese Academy of Science, can grip and climb your shirt sleeves or on to your rugged jeans. Yes, it may seem creepy at first, but then robots never fail to surprise you. Here's what it looks like:



Our robotic pet, Clothbot uses gripper wheels to firmly hold the grip on various kinds of fabrics. And is so light-weight (5 ounces) that you won't feel a thing when it climbs up your back. The developers of this clothbot from China's Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology presented a paper, "System and Design of Clothbot: a Robot for Flexible Clothes Climbing," at the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. We saw this robot in action in the following video -

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