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Robot gripper looks like a wilted flower, but can lift 100 times its weight
- egypturnash 8y agoIs it just me or does this look like a real-world version of a Dalek’s plunger?
- zaroth 8y agoThis is pretty neat! I think we are so predisposed to assume that grasping and lifting things should look a certain way based on our own anatomy. The big questions that come to mind are resilience or I guess you could call it MTBF, and also hygiene. A human hand knows when a thing it picks up has gotten it dirty and can change a glove or go wash. This design in particular looks like it would hang on to particles from things it’s picked up (thinking like bits of broccoli, but also on the microscopic level) and be very difficult to clean with all that surface area. I think for picking groceries you would almost have to dedicate one arm for each SKU placing items into bags that were ferried by, you could not have one arm with a bag moving between SKUs and filling that bag. I fully expect to see lights out grocery stores in the near future, I’m a bit surprised no one has tried it yet. Maybe the last mile delivery still dominates the cost too much.
- neodypsis 8y agoInteresting point of view. Perhaps using a Teflon + antimicrobial coating for its "skin" and integrating a washing device in the robot for it to clean its gripper every now and then could work?
- 7952 8y agoMaybe make it transparent and have some UV led's inside to kill microbes. Occasionally make it grip an air blower to remove dust. And at the end of the day put it in a dishwasher!
- Shorel 8y agoIf it has Teflon it will have a hard time not dropping stuff. Teflon is one of the most slippery solid materials we know.
- swampthinker 8y agoTakeoff tech is one of the startups working on it. https://www.takeoff.com/ https://www.takeoff.com/
- neodypsis 8y agoJust from looking at their home page video, isn't Takeoff's solution more like Kiva Systems'? Are they using robots for pick-up and packaging as well?
- nraynaud 8y agoit's always the same I guess: there's the technology that pays the bills, and the shiny projects that garner press attention. google sells advertisement for insurance companies and real estate and is in the press for phones or moonshot projects.
- code_duck 8y agoI don’t think it would be difficult to clean or change a rubber lining. It looks like it would be smooth when removed. Definitely it would need to be used carefully around difficult to remove allergens.
- IanCal 8y agoIf it's a balloon + paper, at scale it'd probably be cheap enough to consider regularly disposable.
- amelius 8y agoWouldn't holding it regularly near a strong air-blower/sucker suffice?
- code_duck 8y agoContaminants like gluten would have to be removed with soap, but as another commenter suggested it’s more likely they’d be disposable.
- IanCal 8y ago> I fully expect to see lights out grocery stores in the near future, I’m a bit surprised no one has tried it yet. Do you mean fully automated? I think it's the pick/place of irregular objects that's the problem. In the UK, grocery deliveries are pretty cheap and available widely. I actually just looked up ocado to show you a video of the human packers and found that mid last year they were running a fully automated warehouse, and then that it burned down about a month ago.
- ahartmetz 8y ago> I think we are so predisposed to assume that grasping and lifting things should look a certain way based on our own anatomy. Yeah, that is very interesting about it. Also interesting is that it is an endoskeleton with a soft outer hull that is more similar to flesh than the hard rubber cover that you sometimes seen on "traditional" robotic grippers. One could describe this device as replacing eye-muscle and (position, pressure) sensor-muscle feedback with cleverly engineered mechanical compliance. So much for solved problems in motion planning...
- userbinator 8y agoIs it just me who thinks there something very viscerally repulsive about how it looks when it "contracts"?
- gus_massa 8y agoIt looks somewhat similar to "Balloon filled with ground coffee makes ideal robotic gripper" http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2010/10/researchers-develop-universal-robotic-gripper http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2010/10/researchers-develop-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86G9DLJEagw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86G9DLJEagw
- Fricken 8y agoHere's Righthand robotics solution, which combines fingers and a sucker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5i0dsQfPCY&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5i0dsQfPCY&feature=youtu.be
- NicoJuicy 8y agoHere's one with balloons filled with coffee/sand for irregular surfaces: https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-10/coffee-filled-balloon-makes-best-robotic-gripper https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-10/coffee-fil...
- amelius 8y agoWhy does it even need fingers? It seems they don't add much value over just the sucker.
- tyingq 8y agoTheir sales pitch seems to be roughly that the value is more in the machine learning software than the gripper itself. I assume having both means the software can choose how much of each (fingers/suction) to use for a particular item, after it identifies the item. So perhaps it's supposed to work best when there's a variety of items versus a few predictable ones. This article has some background: https://xconomy.com/boston/2017/03/28/righthand-robotics-picks-up-8m-to-automate-next-gen-warehouses/ https://xconomy.com/boston/2017/03/28/righthand-robotics-pic... Also, they seem to have started with fingers only, so there's probably some bias to keep them.
- Shorel 8y ago
- rick22 8y agoIsn't it too costly to produce vacuum for every object pick ?
- macawfish 8y agoI imagine this could work hydraulically too?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- macawfish 8y agoWoah! Just imagine like 5 of these all working together to grab something...
- edoo 8y agoI'm going to crack up if the most effective general robot hand is a flap of rubber. One potential benefit is those handthings won't be able to fire a gun or wield a sharp weapon very well. I half joke but the robot maids are probably going to be quite hackable.
- benj111 8y agoThe title kind of misses the point for me. A piece of string can lift 100 times its own weight. The interesting thing is that it can lift a reasonable variety of different things delicately, in a reasonably simple way.
- GistNoesis 8y agoImpressive, but I'm not sure there aren't some class of objects that will give it a hard time. From The videos it seems that it needs to engulf the object and to do so the object must small enough and be well oriented. I'm not sure it will pass the remote or smartphone on the table test.
- amelius 8y agoCan it grab a pebble that lies on a flat surface? Or would the gripper get stuck to the surface? (Not sure if the suction is used only to deform the gripper or also to attach to the object)
- tmaly 8y agoIf I could only get one of these installed in the claw crane, I might finally be able to grab one of those elusive prizes.