Coffee, Balloons Help Robotic Arm Grip Items
A team of researchers from Cornell University, the University of Chicago, and iRobot have discovered that a balloon filled with granular matter, like coffee grinds, can grip just about any hard, dry object. According to an explanation provided by the scientists, the "universal gripper" passed the notoriously difficult raw egg-coin test.
Balloon filled with ground coffee makes ideal robotic gripper
Graduate student John Amend, left, and associate professor Hod Lipson with the universal robotic gripper.
The robotic gripper conforms to the shape of the item it is lifting.
Collected from: Cornell Chronicle: Universal robotic gripper
University of Chicago physicist Heinrich Jaeger uses a soft gripper to hold up a vial. The gripper consists of a rubber membrane around a granular material that can form around objects, then grab them when a vacuum pump is used to harden the material.
Collected from: Balloon filled with ground coffee makes ideal robotic gripper, research shows | The University of Chicago
Universal robotic gripper based on the jamming of granular material
Gripping and holding of objects are key tasks for robotic manipulators. The development of universal grippers able to pick up unfamiliar objects of widely varying shape and surface properties remains, however, challenging. Most current designs are based on the multifingered hand, but this approach introduces hardware and software complexities. These include large numbers of controllable joints, the need for force sensing if objects are to be handled securely without crushing them, and the computational overhead to decide how much stress each finger should apply and where. Here we demonstrate a completely different approach to a universal gripper. Individual fingers are replaced by a single mass of granular material that, when pressed onto a target object, flows around it and conforms to its shape. [...]
- Brown, E., Rodenberg, N., Amend, J., Mozeika, A., Steltz, E., Zakin, M., Lipson, H., Jaeger, H. (2010) "Universal robotic gripper based on the jamming of granular material," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Vol. 107, no. 43. link to pre-publication, online version of the article
- Link to more details, high-res images, FAQs, and several nice movies at the website of our Cornell collaborators, John Amend and Hod Lipson
- Link to U of Chicago press release
- Link to Cornell University press release
Collected from: Jaeger Group - Granular Materials
Collected from: YouTube - Presenting the Universal Jamming Gripper
- Sources
- Coffee, Balloons Help Robotic Arm Grip Items | News & Opinion | PCMag.com
- YouTube - Universal robotic gripper based on the jamming of granular material
- Cornell Chronicle: Universal robotic gripper
- Balloon filled with ground coffee makes ideal robotic gripper, research shows | The University of Chicago
- Jaeger Group - Granular Materials
- YouTube - Presenting the Universal Jamming Gripper
- "Jamming" Robot Gripper Gets Official: Article Published in PNAS | Hizook
- Related
- Jaeger Group Home Page
- Balloon Plus Coffee Grounds Equals Versatile Robot Gripper | BotJunkie
- The Great Beyond: Ground coffee helps robots get a grip
- Universal robotic gripper based on the jamming of granular material | Cornell Computational Synthesis Laboratory
- CBC News - Technology & Science - Fingerless robot 'hand' grips almost anything
- Universal robotic gripper based on the jamming of granular material — PNAS
