Robot with a soft touch

New Robotic Gripper with the Softest Touch   

           Engineers at the University of California, San Diego created a new robotic gripper that can lift up and  handle items without out having the ability to see them and without needing to be prepared for the task. This robot can sense objects, twist them, and can construct replicas of the item it's manevuering. The bringing together of these three tasks permitted the robot to work in low perceptibility and is what makes this invention a one of a kind.

           - A roboticist, Michael Tolley, and his team revealed the gripper at the International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Robots on Sept 24th to the 28th in Vancouver, Canada. The breakthroughs were possible because of the team's diverse expertise and their experience in the fields of soft robotics and manufacturing

Testing the Robotic Gripper: 

• The Gripper was tested by picking up, shaping and changing a large scale of items. These included lightbulbs and screwdrivers

• The engineers said that this robotic invention was designed to have the same movement as a human reaching into their pocket and grabbing out their keys, a soft touch.  

• The robot has been able to screw in lightbulbs, hold thin pieces of paper and even turn the screwdrivers it was holding

Design:

• The Robotic Gripper has three fingers
• Each is made of chambers that are soft, flexible and move when air pressure is present/used
• It is able to maneuver with items it has acquired because it have more freedom, rotationally speaking
• Each finger is also coated with an intelligent skin that is aware of senses such as temperature, touch, etc. 
• "The skin is made of silicone rubber, where sensors made of conducting carbon nanotubes are embedded. The sheets of rubber are then rolled up, sealed and slipped onto the flexible fingers to cover them like skin."

How it works?

"When the "fingers" grasp and flex, changes of the conductivity of the nanotubes occurs, which allows the sensing skin to take note of/remember and detect when the fingers are in motion and coming into contact with an item. The data that the sensors generate is sent to a control board, which is able to put the information together to create a 3D model of the object the gripper has acquired. "- Michael Tolley

What the Future has to come:

In the upcoming future, the robotic gripper machine will be gradually given and tested with more data, including :adding machine learning and artificial intelligence so that the gripper will actually be able to identify the objects it's has hold of, rather than just model them. 
3D printing also is being looked in to for making the fingers more durable and sturdy.