The grip is easily strong enough to lift and hold onto anything that fits into your hand, and can hold on, for example, if something bumped into it. It doesn't do well with extremely soft objects like cotton balls.ĮG: How strong is the gripper? That is, how much weight can it lift, and once it's holding something, how strong is the grasp?ĮB: The heaviest objects we lifted with the hand-sized gripper were a pair of gallon jugs of water, weighing a total of about 15 pounds. We were especially excited that it could pick up fragile objects like raw eggs and wine glasses, because these are traditionally challenging for robotic grippers. My group has been studying a transition between soft and hard states of granular materials, called "jamming", and together we decided that gripping was a good robotics application for this.ĮG: You successfully tested the gripper with varied objects - what's the one object you were most surprised it could hold? And is there anything that it failed to hold?ĮB: I think I was most surprised that it was able to pick up a penny, because we had expected it would have a harder time forming around very flat objects. My group at the University of Chicago had experience in the physics of soft and granular materials, and we were paired up with robot engineers at Cornell and iRobot. It was based on the observation that humans and animals are mostly made of soft materials, but robots have usually been made of hard materials like metal, and maybe we could build robots with more of the functionality of humans if we switched to softer materials. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in Arlington, Va.Įrico Guizzo: This is an unusual gripper approach and I was wondering how the idea came about.Įric Brown: This grew out of a program to develop a new field of soft robotics that was sponsored by DARPA.
Annan Mozeika and Erik Steltz from iRobot, in Bedford, Mass. Jaeger from the University of Chicago John Amend and Hod Lipson from the Cornell Computational Synthesis Laboratory, in Ithaca, N.Y. The other authors are Nicholas Rodenberg and Prof. To find out more, I spoke to Eric Brown, the lead author of the PNAS paper and a postdoc at the laboratory led by Prof. Now, is it practical? How strong is it? And can this coffee-powered robot hand fetch you a cup of coffee? You've seen it before: Vacuum-sealed coffee packages are hard bricks, but when opened, air rushes in and the packages become deformable.
One way of jamming them together is by applying a vacuum. But when the particles in the material are packed tightly together, they "jam," or lock into one another. So how does it work? When a granular material like sand or coffee grounds is loosely packed it can flow almost like a liquid. Researchers have used the "jamming" principle for robot locomotion before, but this appears to be the first application in manipulation. The approach, they write, "opens up new possibilities for the design of simple, yet highly adaptive systems that excel at fast gripping of complex objects.” The secret, the researchers report in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is the "jamming" phase transition of granular materials - in this case, coffee grounds. The gripper can transition from a soft state, when it's easily deformable and can conform to the shape of various objects, to a rigid state, when it can firmly hold the objects. Researchers at Cornell University, University of Chicago, and iRobot reported this week that they've developed a fingerless robotic gripper made from a rubber bag filled with coffee grounds. Learn more →Īs robot hands go, this is the weirdest I've ever seen.
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