A robotic gripper made from flexible ribbons can pick up objects as delicate as a dandelion to something 16,000 times heavier than itself.
Most robotic grippers are specialised to perform a narrow set of tasks, but performing well in one domain often entails a trade-off. A tool well suited to picking up heavy objects, for example, normally struggles to manipulate much lighter, intricate objects.
at North Carolina State University and his colleagues have developed a gripper that avoids much of this trade-off.
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The gripper is made of out of a sheet of paper cut into ribbons using a technique similar to kirigami, the Japanese art of paper cutting. The researchers then formed this sheet into a spherical gripper shape and attached it to a robotic arm.
The team found that the gripper could pick up water droplets, dandelion heads and 6.4-kilogram weights, as well as perform simple manipulation tasks, like picking grapes, unzipping zips, turning the pages of a book and folding clothes. 鈥淎ll the grasping of objects has a very high success rate of at least 80 per cent,鈥� says Yin.
The researchers also tried fashioning the gripper out of a leaf. This version could pick up light objects, such as a dandelion head and a strawberry, though it struggled with heavier objects.
Yin and his team think the most obvious applications could be in agriculture, for picking fruit, or in food production to manipulate soft ingredients, but the gripper is currently unable to easily rotate and apply force to its contents.
鈥淚t鈥檚 really impressive that they can use the same gripper to pick up a drop of water, a dandelion and a 6-kilogram weight,鈥� says at Imperial College London. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 very rare to be able to have that much versatility.鈥�
Its easy manufacture is also encouraging, says Spiers, though it might require some modifications to work for specific tasks, he says.
Nature Communications
