Why does Clothbot want to climb up your pants?

Tim Hornyak
CNET.com
May 21, 2012

Robots climbing up your leg — are you cool with that? Chinese researchers certainly are, arguing they could become electronic pets, or even “mobile” phones.

Presented this week at the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in St. Paul, Minn., Clothbot was developed by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

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According to IEEE Spectrum, in their research paper “System and Design of Clothbot: a Robot for Flexible Clothes Climbing,” author Yuanyuan Liu and colleagues propose three applications: “a tiny pet climbing on human bodies,” “a movable phone on our shoulder which frees human hands,” and finally, “body inspection.”