“One of my moonshots is to create a robot that can automatically pack groceries for you,” says MIT Professor Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and one of the senior authors of a new paper about the project. This motion lets the gripper grasp a much wider range of objects - such as soup cans, hammers, wine glasses, drones, and even a single broccoli floret. To give these soft robots a bit of a hand, researchers from MIT and Harvard University have developed a new gripper that’s both soft and strong: a cone-shaped origami structure that collapses in on objects, much like a Venus' flytrap, to pick up items that are as much as 100 times its weight. This pliability lets these soft robots pick up anything from grapes to boxes and empty water bottles, but they’re still unable to handle large or heavy items. In recent years, though, roboticists have come to grips with this problem by making fingers out of soft, flexible materials like rubber. They tend to work only in structured environments with predefined shapes and locations, and typically can’t cope with uncertainties in placement or form. While it might have looked like a seamless feat, every movement and placement was coded with careful consideration.Įven with today’s more intelligent and adaptive robots, this task remains difficult for machines with rigid hands. Fifty years ago, the first industrial robot arm (called Unimate) assembled a simple breakfast of toast, coffee, and champagne.
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