Robot Confined to “Curved Space” Defies Known Laws of Physics

According to research, bodies can move freely in curved spaces without pushing against anything. Usually, It’s always the ground, air, or water that humans, animals, and machines push against. The law of conservation momentum led physicists to believe this was a constant until recently.

The surfaces that people, animals, and machines always push against are the earth, the air, or the ocean. Up until recently, physicists thought this was a constant due to the rule of conservation of momentum.
According to Georgia Institute of Technology experts, it turns out that bodies can travel without bumping into anything when they are in curved environments.

The dominating impact of curvature was created by researchers at Georgia Tech, lead by Zeb Rocklin, an assistant professor in the School of Physics, who created a robot that was confined within a sphere with unprecedented degrees of isolation from its surroundings.

In their work, the researchers describe how Newtonian dynamics implies that stationary objects cannot move without exchanging momentum with accelerating objects in order for them to move.

We disobey this criterion by constructing a robot that is contained within a sphere. Due to the non-commutativity of “translations” in curved spaces, the gadget can move forward by actively altering its form, much as a falling cat can use shape changes to control its direction but not its position. When frictional forces are managed, the robot can arrive at a condition with finite momentum but no forward motion.

Curved space

Curved space is a common way to describe non-flat space, whereas Euclidean geometry describes flat space.

Curved spaces, which frequently symbolize gravity, are crucial to general relativity.

“We let our shape-changing object move in the simplest curved space, a sphere, to systematically study the motion in curved space,” explained Rocklin. “We learned that the predicted effect, which was so counter-intuitive that some physicists dismissed it, indeed occurred: as the robot changed its shape, it inched forward around the sphere in a way that could not be attributed to environmental interactions.”

Objects moving within a curved space were the focus of the researchers’ study. Their solution consisted of letting a set of motors drive on curved tracks as moving masses on the sphere.

This was done to confine the object and minimize its interaction with the environment.

The motors were then permanently revolving on a sphere after this system was incorporated holistically into a rotating shaft. The residual force of gravity was reduced by aligning the shaft with Earth’s gravity, and friction was reduced by using air bearings and bushings.

The robot then experienced modest forces from friction and gravity as it kept moving. These forces and curvature effects combined to produce a peculiar dynamic with characteristics that neither force nor curvature could produce on its own.

The study offers a useful illustration of how physical rules and common sense based on flat space can be overturned using curved regions as a paradigm. Rocklin’s experimental methods may be used by other researchers to further investigate these curved areas.

What is it good for?

Despite being very tiny, the curvature-induced impact may become more significant as robotics develops its grasp of it, much to how gravity’s minor frequency shift enabled GPS systems to precisely send their positions to orbiting satellites.

Using the concepts of space’s curvature for movement, spacecraft may negotiate highly curved space near black holes.

Rocklin explained that the research was connected to the examination into the Impossible Engine.

“Its inventor said that it could advance without any propulsion. That engine was in fact impossible, but thanks to the small curvature of spacetime, it was discovered that a device could move forward without the aid of outside forces or the emission of fuel.

The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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