Gripping with grounds

Over the years, researchers have designed sev­er­al dif­fer­ent grip­ping end effec­tors for robot­ic arms. These grip­pers either worked with mechan­i­cal hands, jaws, claws or suc­tion. How­ev­er, one group of researchers has the­o­rized that the best grip­per may not be any of those at all.

The answer may be so sim­ple it may seem sil­ly – cof­fee grounds in a latex balloon.

Yes, that’s right – with all the mech­a­nisms avail­able to manip­u­late, assem­ble, lift, haul and pal­letize items, it is this sim­ple end effec­tor that may change the whole game.

Researchers at Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty designed this new grip­per that they dubbed the ​“uni­ver­sal grip­per.” Accord­ing to an arti­cle by Rebec­ca Boyle, this uni­ver­sal grip­per takes advan­tage of a phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­non called jam­ming transition.

Her exam­ple of this mat­ter tran­si­tion uses cof­fee grounds. When cof­fee grounds are vac­u­um sealed, they seem to be in a sol­id state, but when you open that seal, they start to move more like a liq­uid. This uni­ver­sal grip­per builds on that idea of mat­ter transition.

The bal­loon filled with cof­fee grounds is attached to a robot­ic arm and low­ered to flu­id­ly con­form around the item it is going to lift. Then, all the air is sucked out of the bal­loon and the cof­fee grounds become a sol­id, hold­ing the item in place. When the vac­u­um stops, the cof­fee grounds in the bal­loon revert back to their liq­uid-like form.

While this may be a new wave for grip­ping end effec­tors, pos­si­bly using oth­er types of durable latex or plas­tics and low­er cost items like sand, that work sim­i­lar­ly to cof­fee, it remains to be seen if this uni­ver­sal grip­per will ever out­live the robot­ic grip­pers already in ser­vice, espe­cial­ly those fash­ioned to look so much like that which we use every day – our own hands.

Robots​.com, a cer­ti­fied inte­gra­tor for sev­er­al end effec­tor retail­ers, has sev­er­al robot grip­pers avail­able for pur­chase and cus­tomiza­tion. We help our cus­tomers match the right end effec­tors to the right robots and systems.

For more infor­ma­tion, con­tact Robots​.com today online or at 877−762−6881.