Like an octopus, this glove lets fingers grip slippery objects

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For all its deftness, the human hand is not good at gripping slippery things. But a new glove could change that. Each of its fingertips is outfitted with a sucker inspired by those on the arms of an octopus. These suckers let the wearer grab slick objects underwater without having to squeeze tight.

“Being able to grasp things underwater could be good for search and rescue. It could be good for archaeology. [It also] could be good for marine biology,” says Michael Bartlett. He’s a mechanical engineer at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. His team described the new glove online July 13 in Science Advances.

Each of the glove’s suckers is a cone of rubber about as big as a raspberry. That cone is capped with a thin, stretchy rubber sheet. Pulling air out of the sucker draws its cap into a bowl shape that sticks to surfaces like a suction cup. Pumping air into the sucker inflates the cap. That causes the sucker to pop off surfaces.

Each finger also has a Tic Tac–sized sensor that detects nearby surfaces. When the sensor nears an object, it switches the sucker on that finger to sticky mode.

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