Roboden: the first elastic USB cable?

A company called Asahi Kasei Fibers have recently unveiled a new kind of cable that could easily be the first elastic cable; it’s called the Roboden.

This cable was born mainly for industrial use on robots, which is probably the inspiration for the name. The company, while studying the human skin, realized that it has a stretch factor of 1.5.

In this way Asahi Kasei Fibers created a fiber to mimic the human skin elasticity. To do this they took an elastic fiber and spiraled the cables inside in order to give the required headroom to stretch (as seen in he picture above). This was created in order to create more lifelike robots with less cables dangling around.

As is said in the video, it is in fact available in USB, but while we would think it useful for when we find our standard USB cables to be too short, we can easily find some major flaws. One being that the cable is elastic, therefore it will resume its original length as soon you let go of it. Then there is the performance, would they be affected by this new technology?

Sure it’s not commercialized yet, but if it’s going to go on the market as it is right now, it will find more use in the industrial sector rather than the private.

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