Delicate-Looking Robot Gripper Can Lift 100 Times Its Weight

According to professor Daniela Rus at MIT’s CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), people often imagine a robot with a human shape or some kind of industrial robot arm. In an interview with The Verge, she says she would like to see something different. What she and her team created, a robot gripper is a perfect example. The robot is designed to grab and pick up objects. But what is special about this robot is its unconventional looks.

Visually, it looks more like a deflated balloon or a rubber tulip than a robot hand.

However, this unique look actually makes to gripper potentially really useful. There is a starfish-shaped origami skeleton located underneath the robot’s rubber skin. It opens and closes just like a flower when gas moves in and out of the device’s airtight enclosure.

With this special design, the device is able to pick up fragile objects without breaking them while still keeping a strong grip to lift things that are 100 times heavier than its own weight.

Rus says:

Soft robot grippers are not something new. Over the past ten years, the field has witnessed engineers working to make use of soft machines of different shapes and sizes. One example of the use of this kind of robot is in the logistics field: picking up items in factories and warehouses.

This is due to the incapable of traditional robot grippers to handle items with irregular shapes or delicate ones.

The past few years have experienced a boom in this technology. Besides CSAIL, commercial companies such as RightHand Robotics have also invested in this field, developing from beanbag-like grippers, inflatable robot hands to octopus-tentacles-shaped modules.

However, Rus says her robot gripper is the best version. The tulip shape allows it to approach objects from different angles, compared with a hand gripper, which often comes from the side.

Its origami skeleton, developed in 2017, makes it strong and flexible.

Rus also explains why these kinds of devices have been used more widely. She says that is because “innovations coming out of the lab” is still far ahead of commercial solutions.

Another reason might probably be companies don’t want to replace their expensive equipment with something new.

But there is no doubt that the soft robotics field is going to have a bright future ahead. Rus says: