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Nature inspired researchers to develop a robotic gripper made of soft fabric that acts like an elephant’s trunk to grab, pick up and release objects without breaking them.
UNSW Sydney researchers said the versatile technology could be widely applied in sectors where fragile objects are handled, such as agriculture, food, and science and resource exploration industries, including for human rescue operations or personal assistive devices.
Dr Thanh Nho Do, director of the UNSW Medical Robotics Lab, said the forceps could be commercially available in the next 12-16 months if his team secured an industrial partner.
He is the senior author of a study on the invention, published in Advanced materials technologies this month.
“Our new soft fabric gripper is thin, flat, light and can grab and retrieve various objects, even from tight hollow spaces, such as a pen inside a tube,” Do said.
“This device also has an improved real-time force sensor that is 15 times more sensitive than conventional models and detects the required gripping force to prevent damage to the objects it is handling.
“There is also a thermally activated mechanism that can change the gripper body from flexible to rigid and vice versa, allowing it to grasp and hold objects of various shapes and weights, up to 220 times heavier than the mass of the gripper.”
Image courtesy of UNSW.
Robotics inspired by nature
Dr Do said the researchers found inspiration in nature when designing their soft, non-slip fabric.
“Animals like an elephant, a python or an octopus use the soft, continuous structures of their bodies to wrap their grip around objects, increasing contact and stability – it’s easy for them to explore, grasp and manipulate objects,” he said.
“These animals can do this thanks to a combination of highly sensitive organs, sense of touch and the strength of thousands of muscles with no rigid bone – for example, an elephant’s trunk has up to 40,000 muscles.
“So, we wanted to mimic these grasping skills – holding and manipulating objects are essential motor skills for many robots.”
Improvement on existing calipers
Dr Do said the researchers’ new soft gripper represents an improvement over existing designs that had disadvantages that limited their application.
“Many soft pliers rely on claws or human hand-like structures with multiple fingers that bend inward, but this makes them unsuitable for grasping oddly shaped, heavy or bulky objects or objects smaller or larger than the opening. of the pliers, “he said.
“Many existing soft grippers also lack sensory feedback and adjustable stiffness capability, which means they can’t be used with fragile objects or in confined environments.
“Our technology can grab long, thin objects and retrieve them from tight and confined spaces, as well as hook through holes in objects to pick them up, such as a cup handle.”
Lead author Trung Thien Hoang said the researchers’ fabrication method was also simple and scalable, which made it possible to easily produce the gripper of different sizes and volumes – for example, a one-meter-long gripper can handle objects. at least 300 mm in diameter.
During testing, a prototype of the gripper weighing 8.2g could lift an object weighing 1.8kg – more than 220 times the mass of the gripper – while a 13cm-long prototype could wrap an object with a diameter of 30mm .
Professor Nigel Lovel, who also worked on the invention, said he used a manufacturing process involving computerized apparel engineering and applied newly developed, highly sensitive liquid metal-based touch sensors to detect the gripping force required.
“The gripper’s flat continuum also gives superior surface contact as it wraps around an object, increasing the holding force,” he said.
“In addition, the total heating and cooling cycle of the gripper to change from flexible to rigid structure takes less than half a minute, which is among the fastest to date.”
Integration of robotic arms and sense of touch
Dr. Do has filed a provisional patent for the new gripper after successfully testing and validating the technology as a complete device.
“We now aim to optimize the integrated materials, develop a closed-loop control algorithm, and integrate the gripper into the ends of the robotic arms to autonomously grasp and manipulate objects,” Do said.
“If we can do these next steps, there will be no need to manually lift the gripper, which will help handle very large and heavy objects.
“We are also working to combine the gripper with our recently announced wearable tactile glove, which would allow the user to remotely control the gripper while simultaneously experiencing how an object feels.”
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