Gizmos & Gadgets: Tractor Beams – Science Fiction or Reality?

October 28, 2015

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October 28, 2015 – Tractor beams are such useful tools in outer space science fiction television shows and movies like the Star Trek series. A tractor beam locks onto an object and pulls it to an intended target. How does it work? That we are never told.

But here in the 21st century researchers at two universities, Sussex and Bristol, working with the company, Ultrahaptics (all in the United Kingdom) have built a tractor beam. As they describe it, it is a technology that “can levitate objects of different sizes and materials through air, water and tissue.” It uses an ultrasonic phased array to accomplish the task.

What is that?

They are using sound. The array described in their research paper included 64 miniature loudspeakers creating high-pitched (40Khz), high-intensity sound waves. This creates a force field around the object and through the manipulation of the sound output from different speakers within the array the object can be moved. In the experiment the researchers were able to manipulate a spherical 4 micro-millimeter polystyrene bead.

Because the beam they create is acoustic it cannot work in outer space because without an atmosphere there is nothing to which sound waves can work or react. There is no sound in a vacuum. But terrestrial uses are abundant. The array could be used in transportation, on assembly lines, or in medical applications both diagnostic (think a sound equivalent to MRI) and interventional (surgical applications with a micro-device delivered to a repair point in the body).

But before the invention can be applied to real-world needs it has to scale. So the inventors are pursuing the building of a bigger version with the hope they can levitate a football (the round kind) from a distance of 10 meters (approximately 33 feet). They also want to build a scaled-down version of the technology that could be applied to surgical and pharmacological applications.