Watch an elephant-inspired robotic gripper harvest a single grape like a pro

Elephants have amazing trunks. They can pick up small sticks and giant logs with dexterity and ease. The curling design itself inspired researchers from the University of New South Wales in Sydney to create a robotic gripper that can grab anything from a syringe to a hammer.

“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,” said medical robotics expert Thanh Nho. I give in a UNSW statement on Monday. Do is co-author of a gripper article published in Advanced Materials Technologies magazine last week.

UNSW shared a video of a prototype in action wrapping around a variety of objects, including a screwdriver, handsaw, cucumber, and even a single grape. Its flexibility and sensitivity means it can be used to handle delicate and fragile objects without crushing them.

While the robotic gadget looks simple, there is a lot of technology packed into the small device. The gripper uses a force sensor to apply the right amount of pressure to an object.

“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,” he said. Do.

The team is now working on connecting the gripper to the robotic arms. Pairing the gripper with a tactile glove would allow human operators to feel what the robot is doing. The device may be commercially available within two years.

In recent years, we’ve seen a boom in nature-inspired robotic innovations, everything The dog-like robot Spot from Boston Dynamics to robotic octopus-like tentacle from Harvard. Our future robot masters could look a lot like an animal menagerie.