Last March, roboticist Eric Brown and co-workers at the University of Chicago made headlines with their new, unconventional robot gripper design: a balloon filled with coffee grounds or other grainy material and fitted with a vacuum line. At atmospheric pressure, the balloon is squishy and can be “mushed” around an object—even traditionally hard-to-grip stuff like […]
Wicked mechanical papercraft from Instructables user dombeef. I actually made a remarkably similar model when I was but a lad, but it didn’t turn out nearly as well as this one. It’s his entry in their ongoing Toy Challenge.
Using special designed and machined grippers, this prototype ‘bot from researchers Matthew Journee, XiaoQi Chen, James Robertson, Mark Jermy, and Mathieu Sellier can climb wooden, metal, and cloth surfaces with ease. Rough textures and small gaps in the substrate apparently present no problem, and the video includes impressive footage of the machine dragging an additional half-kilo weight up a wooden door and rolling around upside-down on a ceiling made of glass.
In this video, Steve Norris of Norris Labs presents his low-cost implementation of Cornell’s jamming-skin-enabled balloon gripper using a Handi-Vac as a vacuum source. [via BotJunkie]
Peter Jacob of Lets Make Robots put together this incredibly detailed tutorial on how to make a simple robot gripper by hand using a cheap micro servo, plexiglass, rotary tool, and a tiny blowtorch.
