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Robots just can’t get a grip on things. The development of dexterous robotic grippers has drastically evolved over the past decade. Old school designs made from clunky materials and complex control methods have been replaced with flexible designs made from soft materials and simple control methods. This relatively new design philosophy, known as soft robotics, boosts a robot’s ability to handle objects the way a human hand does.
Researchers at the Berlin University of Technology in Germany have developed RBO Hand 2, a soft compliant gripper designed in the form of a human hand. With object compliancy as the main feature, the gripper adapts and deforms to multiple shapes with minimal control effort. The flexible approach allows the gripper to grasp oddly-shaped objects resting on flat surfaces like tabletops.
Gentle compliance improves the gripper’s diversity of grasps it can achieve while keeping the control method relatively lightweight in terms of complexity. Unlike the gripper shown above, rigidly-designed grippers are prone to moving objects out of place leaving the robot unable to grab ahold, and the methods of control are overly complicated often requiring complex computer programs.
Applications that could take advantage of these soft robotic grippers include food handling and product manufacturing.
Source: International Journal of Research Robotics
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