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Soft Robotic Fingers Use Electroadhesion for a Gentle Touch

EPFL scientists have developed a new soft robotic gripper - made out of rubber and stretchable electrodes - that can bend and pick up delicate objects like eggs, water balloons, and paper. It uses electroadhesion: flexible electrode flaps that act like a thumb-index gripper. "This is the first time that electroadhesion and soft robotics have been combined together to grasp objects," says Jun Shintake, doctoral student at EPFL. The lightweight gripper may soon be handling food for the food industry, capturing debris in outer space, or incorporated into prosthetic hands. When the voltage is turned on, the electrodes bend towards the object to be picked up, imitating muscle function. The tip of the electrodes act like fingertips that gently conform to the shape of the object, gripping onto it with electrostatic forces in the same way that the balloon sticks to the wall. These electrodes can carry 80 times its own weight and no prior knowledge about the object's shape is necessary. In comparison, other soft grippers are either pneumatically controlled or fail at picking up fragile objects without telling the gripper beforehand about the object's shape. They also have been unable able to handle flat or deformable objects.

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    Transcript

    00:00:05 We've developed a new robotic gripper that can grasp almost any shaped object it's able to grasp extremely delicate objects and fragile objects yet at the same time, it's strong enough to lift heavy objects. The novelty of this device is that we combine two functionalities which have been studied before, artificial muscles and electroadhesion, into one single device that has the two functionalities at once thanks to the particular patterning of the electrodes. So this is our two-fingered gripper, finger one finger, finger two .The fingers are stretchable silicones with specially designed shape of electrodes in them that allowed two things to happen one is a bending shape that allows us to get close to the object and then we use the special shape at the end to get a very strong holding thanks to electroadhesion.

    00:00:48 The advantage of this device is that you can grab many different types of objects of many shapes. For example you can grab a piece of paper, flat, you can grab an egg, or you can grab any type of object and these objects can be also very fragile because the mechanism will very softly comply with the shape of the object. So we can imagine it being used in humanoid robot hands, artificial hand for arobot companion. It can also be used in the food industry, it could even be used in space to catch debris. This gripper is lightweight and scalable. We can find possible applications in flying drones. This is a step forward compared to the past in robotics because in the past

    00:01:29 you had to use different type of end effectors for the different types of objects that you want to manipulate.