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Nature inspired engineers at UNSW Sydney 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.
The researchers say the versatile technology could be widely applied in industries 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, professor of Scientia and 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.
Dr. Do worked with study lead author and doctoral candidate Trung Thien Hoang, Phuoc Thien Phan, Mai Thanh Thai and his Scientia collaborator Professor Nigel Lovell, head of the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering.
“Our new soft-tissue gripper is thin, flat, lightweight and can grab and retrieve various objects, even from tight hollow spaces, such as a pen inside a tube,” said Dr. Do.
“This device also features an improved real-time force sensor that is 15 times more sensitive than conventional models and detects the gripping force needed to avoid 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 back, allowing it to grasp and hold objects of various shapes and weights, up to 220 times heavier than the mass of the gripper.”
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 for increased 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, the 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 opening the clamp, “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, narrow spaces, as well as hook into 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 meter-long gripper could handle objects of at least 300mm in diameter.
During testing, a prototype of a gripper weighing 8.2 grams could lift an object weighing 1.8 kilograms – more than 220 times the mass of the gripper – while a 13-centimeter-long prototype could envelop an object with a diameter of 30 mm. .
Prof. Nigel Lovell said: ‘We used a manufacturing process involving computerized apparel engineering and applied newly developed and highly sensitive liquid metal-based touch sensors to detect the required gripping force.
“The continuous flat of the gripper also gives superior contact with surfaces as it wraps around an object, increasing the holding force.
“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.
The gripper is expected to be commercially available in the next 12-16 months if it finds an industrial partner.
‘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 grasp and manipulate objects autonomously,’ said Dr. Do.
“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 on combining the gripper with our recently announced wearable tactile glove, which would allow the user to remotely control the gripper while experiencing how an object feels at the same time.”
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIelv-iABQs&feature=emb_logo
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