by David Geer
Contact the author at geercom@windstream.net
Getting A Grip
Fingerless Robot Hand Grabs, Carries,
Pours, and Writes
What can you do with a latex balloon, some coffee grounds, and suction?
You can create a universal jamming robotic gripper hand that can pick up
anything. This unconventional approach to an end effector/manipulator
skirts the many issues that come with developing a humanoid robot hand.
With multi-fingered humanoid hand research, there are challenges such as how to actuate the many finger
joints, how to apply force sensing so delicate objects can be
held firmly without breaking or damaging them, and how
to address the great mass of algorithms and computations
necessary to calculate the force applied to each object by
each finger.
As such, fingered hands are extremely intricate due to
hardware complexities, actuation complexities, and the
need for expansive software-based intelligence to perform
the sub-tasks that lead to gripping and lifting with fingers.
See how the universal jamming gripper safely grasps and lifts
an egg without breaking it. (Now, if they can only teach one
or two hands to crack the egg and whip up a nice dish ...)
As a result, humanoid finger-based hand research and
development has proven expensive. Roboticists have
invested themselves heavily to create universal gripping
hands — hands that can pick up anything — using this
model.
On the other hand, researchers and roboticists at
Cornell University, the University of Chicago, and iRobot
Corporation, have applied mechanical engineering and
particle science to the complex problem of a universal robot
gripper. Between them, Cornell’s John Amend and Hod
Lipson, Chicago’s Heinrich Jaeger, and iRobot’s Chris Jones
Here, the hand grips and lifts a spring device (such as an
actuator or shock absorber) which has a less predictable
surface to work with.
10 SERVO 01.2011
