Robots are usually made of metal, which makes it difficult for them to grasp and identify objects. Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are now making robots out of softer materials, such as silicone, paper, and fiber. As compared their traditional metal counterparts, these soft robots are better at several skills: recovering from crashes, squeezing into tight spaces, and handling a variety of objects. The CSAIL team recently demonstrated a 3-D printed robotic hand made out of silicon rubber. The hand can pick up objects that hard robots would typically drop or crush. The soft robot gripper successfully handled an egg, a CD, tennis ball, a Rubik’s cube and a Beanie Baby.
“Robots are often limited in what they can do because of how hard it is to interact with objects of different sizes and materials,” CSAIL Director Daniela Rus told MIT News. “Grasping is an important step in being able to do useful tasks; with this work we set out to develop both the soft hands and the supporting control and planning systems that make dynamic grasping possible.”
Researchers control the robotic fingers by using a series of pistons that push pressurized air through the silicone material, which causes the fingers to stretch and bend. The hand was made for the popular Baxter manufacturing robot, but the interface and exterior finger molds are 3-D printed, so the system could work on any robotic platform. The soft material makes it difficult for robots to correctly identify objects or even know whether they have picked up an object at all. To mitigate this, the CSAIL hand has “ben sensors” which send location data based on an object’s curvature. With just data points from each of the robot’s three fingers, algorithms can distinguish between many objects.
In the future, the researchers plan to improve the sensors so that the gripper will eventually be able to quickly pick up and identify many objects.
