Robo-Gripper
The human hand can pick up, move, and place objects easily, but for a robot, this gripping mechanism is a challenge. Researchers from Cornell, the University of Chicago, and iRobot Corp. have created a versatile gripper using ground coffee and a latex party balloon. Cornell graduate student John Amend and Mechanical Engineering professor Hod Lipson demonstrate the gripper prototype.
Transcript
00:00:11 a robotic gripper is a end-effector so it's something you put on the end of a robot arm that helps it pick up whatever item you may want it to pick up so the one that we've developed here is a universal gripper so it can pick up many different items with the same gripper the design of the gripper is very simple has two main components one is this mass of granular material and we find after
00:00:35 quite a bit of research that coffee has worked very well for us for that mass of granular material and it's encased in an elastic membrane and for this prototype we're using a latex balloon for that membrane and so what happens then is you can control the pressure inside the balloon and if you evacuate the air from the balloon it'll contract very slightly and the coffee will become vacuum packed
00:00:57 and become very hard so this is this is a prototype of what this gripper looks like above you basically have here is a party balloon filled with grains of coffee and why did we choose these materials that's basically you know if you've ever had the old vacuum packed coffee you know it's as hard as a brick but once you release the vacuum of that package of the coffee spills like too
00:01:19 fluid so this is what we call the phase transition between solid and fluid we've seen it in watering ice it's exactly the same phenomena here but instead of atoms of water molecules of water we have grains of coffee I tried rice we tried different seeds and beans and many different things and we found that coffee was it was a very good material to use because it was
00:01:42 irregular so the grains did kind of interesting things and locked and locked into each other really good when it when it was driven into the into the jamming state that rigid state you know the the big leap that we've done this project led by Heinrich Jaeger from Chicago was to realize that this very fundamental process can be used in robotics and and I think that's that's
00:02:09 you know that that's the big step once once Heinrich realized this then it was a question of how to apply at the different ways what materials work best and so forth you know this is one example of applying this concept to to manipulation but you can also imagine other applications you can imagine for example structures that are soft when they need to be they can reconfigure and
00:02:34 then harden when they need to so we can figure those structures you can imagine putting this kind of structure on the feet of a robot so that they can walk on the wall or on the ceiling and grasp things as it's walking you can imagine putting these kinds of things on robotic tracks on fingers so there's really lots of ways that this kind of technology can be used and we want to see where it can
00:02:58 take us