You are aware of how difficult it is to grasp and hold onto items with robotic grippers if you have ever played the claw game at an arcade. Imagine how much more nerve-wracking that game would be if you were attempting to collect a delicate piece of endangered coral or a precious treasure from a sunken ship instead of soft teddy animals.
Most of today’s robotic grippers use a combination of the operator’s ability and integrated sensors, intricate feedback loops, or cutting-edge machine-learning algorithms to grasp delicate or irregularly shaped items. There is, however, a simpler method, as revealed by researchers at Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).
They created a novel soft robotic gripper that ensnares and entangles things in a manner analogous to how jellyfish capture their prey by using a network of thin tentacles. Individual filaments, or tentacles, are not very strong on their own. However, when used as a group, the filaments can firmly grip and hold things of all shapes and sizes. The gripper doesn’t need sensing, planning, or feedback control; it only uses straightforward inflation to wrap around items.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the study (PNAS).
The study’s primary author and former graduate student at SEAS Kaitlyn Becker remarked, “With this research, we aimed to reinvent how humans engage with things.” “We built a gripper that is larger than the sum of its parts and a grasping strategy that can adapt to a variety of complicated objects with minimum preparation and perception by taking use of the innate compliance of soft robotics and boosting it with a compliant structure.”
At the moment, Becker teaches mechanical engineering as an assistant professor at MIT. The gripper’s capacity to entangle itself with the target it is seeking to grab gives it strength and versatility. These foot-long rubber tubes have hollow inside. Rubber is thicker on one side of the tube than the other, so when pressure is applied, the tube coils like a pigtail or looks straightened on a wet day.
Each entanglement strengthens the grasp as the curls knot and entangle with the item and each other. Although the overall grip is tight, each individual touch is feeble and won’t break even the most delicate thing. The filaments are simply depressurized to release the item.
The gripper’s effectiveness was tested via simulations and trials, picking up a variety of things, including toys and different houseplants. In practical applications, the gripper might be utilised to pick up soft fruits and vegetables for agricultural production and distribution, fragile tissue in medical settings, or even irregularly shaped products in warehouses, like glassware.
This novel gripping strategy combines the topological physics of entangled filaments research of Professor L. Mahadevan with the soft robotic gripper research of Professor Robert Wood.
According to Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics in SEAS, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Physics in FAS and co-corresponding author of the paper, “Entanglement enables each highly compliant filament to conform locally with a target object leading to a secure but gentle topological grasp that is relatively independent of the details of the nature of the contract.”
According to Wood, the Harry Lewis and Marlyn McGrath Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences and co-corresponding author of the paper, “This new approach to robotic grasping complements existing solutions by replacing simple, traditional grippers that call for complex control strategies with extremely compliant, and morphologically complex filaments that can operate with very simple control.” This method broadens the variety of objects that robotic grippers can take up.
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